Cavium's OCTEON II and the Lattice' ECP3 FPGA to talk via serial I/O

Lattice Semiconductor is working to interoperate between Cavium Networks' newly launched OCTEON II CN63XX processors and its LatticeECP3 FPGA family via a Serial Rapid IO (SRIO) Specification 2.1 link. SRIO is commonly used in 3G/4G wireless base stations and wireline switches and routers where low latency is critical. The combination of Cavium's OCTEON II processor and Lattice Semiconductor's FPGA can help designers to develop unique embedded system platform with security.

"The addition of the SRIO interface in the OCTEON II processors, along with the wide variety of other standards-based interfaces, provides a new low-latency connectivity option," said Tasha Castañeda, Senior Strategic Alliance Manager, Cavium Networks. "We are pleased to add Lattice to Cavium's PACE (Partnership to Accelerate Customer End-solutions) ecosystem in order to offer our customers a strong FPGA design solution."

"Lattice is excited to be working with Cavium Networks. This SRIO interoperability testing will strengthen our rich portfolio of wireless IP. We are working to introduce future bridging applications for the OCTEON II and our ECP3 family, including SRIO to CPRI, SRIO to PCIe and SRIO to SGMII," said Ted Marena, Director of Business Development for Lattice.

On the embedded software front OCTEON II receives support from two leading vendors. Green Hills Software has made available it's multicore embedded software for the OCTEON II family and MontaVista has also announced support for OCTEON II Processors. Another interesting cloud computing software company who announced support for OCTEON II processor family is 6WIND. 6WIND has optimized its software 6WINDGate for OCTEON II multi-core MIPS64 platform for developing Internet infrastructure equipments.