For Release: July 24, 2001
Altera's Atlantic™ Interface Speeds Development of Clearwater Networks' Multigigabit Networking Reference Platform
Atlantic™ Interface Provides "Network Glue" in Reference Platform for
Clearwater's CNP810SP Network Services Processor
San Jose, Calif., July 24, 2001 -- Altera Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTR) announced today that Clearwater Networks has successfully implemented the Atlantic™ interface, integrating various networking functions within its quad-gigabit ethernet hardware reference platform. Altera's Atlantic interface greatly shortened the development time of this platform, proving that developers, when armed with the right programmable logic technology, can rapidly create complex communications systems involving disparate elements.
Clearwater Networks, an innovator in the development of next-generation network services processors, designed the reference platform to allow customers of its CNP810SP network services processor to rapidly develop and deploy advanced networking services. Such services include URL-based web switching, SSL acceleration, network address translation (NAT), IPv6 gateways, and content-aware traffic shaping at multigigabit data rates. Altera's Atlantic interface enabled Clearwater Networks to bridge network protocols within the reference platform, easing its development and allowing quick release to customers.
"Using Atlantic, we were able to quickly bridge between Altera's POS-PHY Level 3 intellectual property (IP) MegaCore® function and other networking functions in our reference design," said Sundar Rajan, director of Network Systems at Clearwater Networks. "The Atlantic interface's optimal routing and low latency allowed us to meet all of our performance goals. Altera offered us not only the POS-PHY Level 3 IP, but also the means to easily integrate it into our design via the Atlantic interface, along with excellent customer support. We achieved significant time and cost savings with this truly complete solution."
"Leading-edge systems developers are challenged to deal with a proliferation of emerging intra-chip, chip-to-chip and board-to-board communication standards such as Flexbus, POS-PHY, HyperTransport, RapidIO, and many others," said Craig Lytle, vice president of Altera's intellectual property business unit. "Because it is designed to easily bridge these standards, the Atlantic interface can act as 'network glue' in these systems. This capability is essential in enabling a developer to create an entire system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) as quickly and easily as possible."
About the Atlantic Interface
Altera's Atlantic interface is a scalable, high-speed on-chip interface for packet and cell transfer. Optimized for programmable logic devices, Atlantic allows designers to quickly and easily build bridges between incompatible devices, as well as facilitate the user's integration of intellectual property with a simple, clearly defined, and supported interface.
The Atlantic interface is designed as a datapath bus for packet transfer between communications IP. Defined with minimal overhead, Atlantic utilizes approximately 10 control signals in addition to a variable width data bus, and an optional address bus. The control signals include parity, start-of-packet, end-of-packet, error, empty, enable or data valid or data available signals. Atlantic utilizes a simple four-way handshake as flow control and is scalable all the way up to 40Gb/s and beyond.
About the CNP810SP Processor
The CNP810SP processor allows networking equipment vendors to implement advanced layer 4-7 networking services such as URL-based web switching, traffic shaping, billing, service level agreements (SLA), VPN's, network address translation (NAT), stateful firewalls, TCP termination, and IPv6 gateways at multigigabit data rates. The CNP810SP processor is capable of processing over 25 million packets per second and can gluelessly connect to standard networking interfaces at up to 12.8 Gbps. The processor is designed to sit on line cards or service cards within edge routers, or on PCI and PCI-X cards in NAS devices and network servers. The CNP810SP processor provides a simple programming interface that runs MIPS-compatible software and leverages standard development tools, providing time-to-market advantages as well as increased performance.
About Clearwater Networks, Inc.
Clearwater Networks, formerly XStream Logic, is a leader in the development of network services processors optimized for performing advanced Layer 4-7 packet processing at multi-gigabit data rates. The company is committed to providing the first network processor family designed to address a wide array of packet-processing applications, including high-performance networking, server I/O, and storage applications. The company's Board of Directors includes high-tech industry and finance leaders such as Kevin Fong, Managing Partner of Mayfield, and Dado Banatao, General Partner of Tallwood Ventures, and Ankur Sahu of Goldman, Sachs & Co. Other directors include Joseph Kennedy, President, Chairman and CEO at Pluris, Inc., and Charles Carinalli, Chairman and CEO of Adaptive Silicon. Clearwater Networks is headquartered in Los Gatos, California. The company can be reached at (408) 376-1500, or visit their corporate web site at http://www.clearwaternetworks.com.
About Altera
Altera Corporation, The Programmable Solutions Company®, was founded in 1983 and is a leading supplier of programmable logic devices (PLDs). Altera's CMOS-based PLDs are user-programmable semiconductor chips that enhance flexibility and reduce time-to-market for companies in the communications, computer peripheral, and industrial markets. By using high performance devices, software development tools, and sophisticated intellectual property cores, system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions can be created with embedded processors, memory, and other complex logic together on a single PLD. Altera common stock is traded on The Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol ALTR. More information on Altera is available on the Internet at http://www.altera.com.
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