Aquantia Announces the Industrys First FPGA-Programmable Multi-Gigabit Ethernet PHY Device

AQcite™ product family integrates Aquantia’s industry-leading AQrate^® BASE-T PHY with a Xilinx^® Kintex-7^® FPGA

San Jose, Calif., January 30, 2017 – Aquantia Corp., a pioneer and market leader in high-speed Ethernet connectivity solutions for data centers, enterprise infrastructure and client connectivity, today announced the AQcite product line of FPGA-programmable Multi-Gigabit Ethernet Physical Layer (PHY) devices, integrating Aquantia’s AQrate BASE-T PHY with a Xilinx^® Kintex^®-7 FPGA. The new AQcite product line targets a vast range of applications such as Audio-Visual (AV) over Ethernet, machine vision, data center, enterprise, 5G wireless, industrial, metro environments and more.

With the rising cost of Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), many companies are resorting to develop, test and commercialize products based on FPGAs. In applications where transport of data and networking is required, Ethernet is often the preferred choice. Foreseeing the need to deliver smaller footprints and cost advantages to its customers, Aquantia has developed AQcite, a unique device that integrates both Multi-Gigabit BASE-T PHY and FPGA functions in a single-chip package.

The first such product unveiled today, the AQLX107, is a single-port FPGA-programmable Multi-Gigabit Ethernet PHY device. Aquantia’s AQLX107 enables customers to engineer their own unique protocol converter, bridge/controller, data multiplexing or adaptation layer functionality leveraging standard Ethernet protocol.

“As Multi-Gigabit penetrates further in the market, customers want to develop their own system solutions while riding the network speed upgrade and ubiquity of standard Ethernet,” said Amir Bar-Niv, VP Marketing at Aquantia. “Combining a Xilinx FPGA with our best-in-breed AQrate technology has allowed us to deliver a unique product that we believe will unleash a vast number of applications.”

“Our collaboration with Aquantia underscores Xilinx’s commitment to enable and accelerate the integration of high speed video interfaces with our state-of-the-art programmable devices that increase our customer’s ability to innovate, differentiate, and accelerate time to market of video over IP products,” said Ramesh Iyer, Director of Pro AV and Broadcast Products at Xilinx. “With Ethernet being the most ubiquitous and well accepted networking protocol in the industry, Aquantia’s AQLX107 integrates advanced 5-speed Ethernet PHY with one of the most advanced FPGAs in the market.”

Xilinx led Aquantia’s series G round of financing in Q1 2014, enabling the company to accelerate its development strategy in data center and enterprise infrastructure.

The integrated Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA supports 12.5 Gbps HSIO differential SerDes signals and a variety of GPIO interfaces. It also supports the standard Xilinx programming SW tools.

AQLX107’s integrated BASE-T PHY supports the following features:

• Integrated MACsec (IEEE-802.1ae) and PTP (IEEE-1588v2):
  • Enables refresh of legacy switches without an ASIC re-spin
• Full support for AES-256 and stand-alone operation
• IEEE 802.3an/bz and NBASE-T compliant featuring AQrate Adaptive Rate Operation:
  • 10GBASE-T over up to 100m of Cat6A cables
  • 5GBASE-T and 2.5GBASE-T over 100m+ of Cat5e or Cat6 cables
  • Also backward-compatible to 1000BASE-T and 100BASE-TX
• Robust Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) performance:
  • Designed for resilient operation when exposed to RFI/EMI

Availability

Aquantia’s AQLX107 is currently sampling. Production release is scheduled for April 2017. Please contact sales@aquantia.com for further information including Aquantia’s AQLX107 development board.

About Aquantia

Aquantia is a leading developer and global supplier of high-speed semiconductor connectivity solutions. Backed by more than a decade of technology leadership and execution, Aquantia’s market leading product portfolio enables the world’s most innovative computing, data center, and enterprise infrastructure applications. Aquantia addresses ever-changing market needs by providing an extensive portfolio, based on architectural innovations that deliver high performance, low power consumption, high density and high-quality silicon solutions to its customers. Aquantia is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, with strong venture capital and strategic investors. For more information, visit www.aquantia.com.