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dspZONE Products for the week of December 8, 2008
TranSwitch Corporation Says…
Gigabit-rate, Multi Core Atlanta 2000 Communications Processors
Highly integrated gateway system-on-chip enables enterprise level performance in mass market CPE applications
TranSwitch Corporation has announced its new Atlanta 2000 communications processor product family. Atlanta 2000 offers robust gateway routing, security and VoIP capabilities with unmatched performance and power efficiency, enabling customers to develop the next generation of high performance ‘green’ networking products and services for residential, small office/home office (SOHO), and small to medium-sized business (SMB) customer premise equipment (CPE) applications.
As service providers fulfill the surging demand for triple play services to the home and secure, high bandwidth data connectivity for small businesses and branch offices, they will create new demands for performance and functionality on the CPE equipment deployed at these locations. Atlanta 2000, a highly integrated SoC solution, was designed specifically to meet the demands for these new services.
Atlanta 2000 offers wire-speed Gigabit routing performance for small packets with scalable Voice-over-IP for up to eight low-bit-rate voice channels. The processor’s innovative SoC design integrates all functions of a broadband gateway, including a DSP for voice and key exchange, security processors and a Gigabit Ethernet switch. Due to its high level of integration, Atlanta 2000 enables CPE manufacturers to achieve ground-breaking efficiency in their Bill-of-Materials (BOM), enabling them to deliver tremendous value in this cost sensitive market segment. For business applications, network security is a key requirement. Atlanta 2000 supports multiple network security applications such as IPSec and SSL accelerators with best-in-class performance.
“Atlanta 2000 is the latest and most advanced member of our field-proven communications processor product line,” said Dr. Sudhir Chandratreya, vice president of engineering and technology at TranSwitch Corporation. “With the Atlanta 2000 line of processors, we’ve developed a best-in-class platform that supports Gigabits-per-second throughput with the highest degree of functional integration including dual RISC cores, built-in DSP, hardware security engines, and packet processing accelerators - everything the market needs to drive next-generation PON, xDSL and wireless voice-enabled broadband gateways and security appliances. Other less innovative solutions struggle to achieve wirespeed throughput and may degrade performance when managing multiple voice channels and/or customer applications in parallel. Atlanta 2000’s innovative design, which incorporates state-of-the-art multi-issue, Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) CPUs, high-speed DDR2 memory and on-chip accelerators, maximizes packet processing throughput without compromising performance on other fronts” concluded Dr. Chandratreya.
About Atlanta 2000
Atlanta 2000 is a family of communications processors optimized for Gigabit-rate packet processing applications. The Atlanta 2000 product suite provides best-in-class performance at the lowest power and bill-of-materials costs for a range of applications that require IP packet routing, encryption and media processing at data rates up to two gigabits-per-second. These applications include secure broadband gateways, SSL/TLS and IPSec acceleration, and micro-PBX. Atlanta 2000 is enhanced by an open software model and publicly available Developers Edition Toolkit reference software, enabling equipment vendors to bring products to market faster at a lower cost with higher return on investment.
EN-Genius Says…
TranSwitch’s Atlanta 2000 communications processor is a great example of how embedded DSP can be used to cut the power and cost of multimedia networking applications. Its mix of DSP and RISC engines is a highly-evolved version of the Atlanta 100 processor developed by Centillium Communications before they were acquired by Transwitch a year or so ago. Capable of supporting both packet and voice processing in SoHo/SMB broadband CPE, voice gateways, and small IP-PBX applications, its on-chip DSP capabilities give it an edge over other highly-integrated CPE processors like Cavium’s value-oriented Octeon 5020 series (reviewed here December 2007) and Marvell’s Link Street switch family.
Like most comms processors in its market, the Atlanta 2000 is a collection of specialized processors and I/O cores tied together by a high-speed interconnect bus. The mix includes a pair of 400 MHz Tensilica LX2 superscalar RISC CPUs with 16 k of L1 I-cache, 16 k of D-cache, plus 64 k of zero-latency local SRAM. The 16-bit cores support variable-length instructions that allow the Atlanta 2000 to make efficient use of the limited instruction space that’s usually available in embedded applications. In most gateways applications one core is used for fast path (data stream processing) tasks with the other dedicated to running application and control plane software. TranSwitch says that when it is used in security applications both processors operate in parallel. In either case, a small chunk of TranSwitch-supplied inter-processor communication firmware allows efficient coordination of tasks between CPUs.
Atlanta 2000 is equipped with a nice mix of I/O including a pair of USB 2.0 ports, a configurable PCI/PCIe host bus interface, and three triple-speed Gigabit Ethernet MACs. The classification engines on each of the MACs do a significant amount of pre-processing that frees the RISC core’s capacity for additional throughput or running higher-level traffic management functions. The engines handle L2-L 4 packet parsing and classification. This information is fed to an ingress/egress queuing/rate control engine that has four hardware queues and supports hierarchical queuing structure with up to 16 rules. Performing so much of the classification and traffic management at the MAC is one of the main reasons that the Atlanta 2000 is able to sustain such high performance, even when passing short UDP packets.
What’s less typical is the embedded DSP core, a 333 MHz superscalar architecture with four execution units, each of which can perform two ALU operations, one MAC operation, and two data moves per clock cycle. While not all code segments can take full advantage of the 6 GOPS worth of processing power available, TranSwitch says that their voice processing firmware library has been tweaked to use as many of the available operations as possible.
Embedding a high-performance DSP in the Atlanta gives it native voice processing capabilities that any of its competitors would have to get by adding a second chip to the BOM. As a gateway, it can support up to 8 channels of full-duplex, derived low-bit rate (G.729, G.726, G.723) POTS voice as well as G.722.2 for AMR wideband. For wireless applications, the DSP can also handle the G.722 protocol used by DECT handsets and the EVRCA protocol that’s popular in derived voice-over-WiMAX applications. One of the few other CPE comms processors to boast an integrated DSP is Mindspeed’s Comcerto series, a feature that I suspect has been one of the factors in the respectable number of design wins it’s enjoyed.
Although the Atlanta 2000 is significantly more powerful than their well-proven Atlanta 100 it shares the same Linux kernel distribution for the Tensilica processor and is code-compatible with the earlier chip. This gives you ready access to the substantial library of functions and applications that have already been developed for their earlier processors. The Atlanta 2000 development platform is built around Linux and other open-source resources including SIP, MGCP, and MEGACO stacks, a router stack with NAT and firewall functionality and an Asterisk PBX standard stack that should come in very handy in voice gateway applications.
 Putting this much processing power and connectivity onto a single chip makes it a great candidate for use in gateway routers, standalone home gateways with integrated multimedia (VoIP and video) support or high-density VoIP gateways. Other variants with dual crypto cores make a low-cost building block for security appliances or SSL VPN processors. TranSwitch says that for basic SSL/VPN applications, the Atlanta 2000 can be run either in an in-line configuration at up to 2 Gbit/s or as a look-aside/co-processor for advanced applications. TranSwitch was smart to position the Atlanta 2000 for up-market applications where it won’t have to compete with several excellent solutions like PMC’s MSP7140/50 series (reviewed July 2007) and Ikanos’ Vx180 VDSL/ADSL gateway (reviewed April 2007), which already have a firm grip the space.
Despite its capabilities, the Atlanta 2000 has a typical power consumption of only 1.5 W – about half that of a Cavium processor with roughly equivalent functionality (minus the DSP core). TranSwitch says that Atlanta’s low power allows them to build a complete gateway router system that draws well under 12 W, low enough to plug directly into a standard Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) port or to draw its power directly off of an ONU (a critical requirement for the Japanese market). The low power will also come in handy for stretching the life of the backup batteries used to keep POTS/E911 services alive during power outages.
In addition to competing well against Cavium’s offerings, Transwitch intends to challenge the CPE products like Mindspeed’s Comcerto series but they really have their sights set on Marvell because of the large chunk of the market they currently own. If TranSwitch can help the former Centillium team expand their exposure beyond the Japanese market, where they’ve always done well, I think that the Atlanta 2000’s proven track record and excellent cost/performance ratio should give them a good chance at eating at least some of Brand M’s lunch. To see a feature-by-feature comparison of the Atlanta 2000 and its competition, check out the handy tables that TranSwitch provided which appear below the main body of this article.
 The first members of the Atlanta 2000 family are sampling in Q3 of 2009, with full production scheduled for some time soon after. A2000 will be priced at $12 to $18 per unit for residential gateway applications depending on volume and package type. This is in keeping with TranSwitch’s goal of pricing Atlanta in a way that allows OEMs to build a full-featured gateway router with 3 GbE ports, 2 USB ports, PCI/PCIe host bus, DDR II memory interface with a $100 retail price. The BOM they showed me (see the table below) did not include the price of an A2000/2100 chip or a power supply and case (probably around $5) but the $32.05 total leaves just enough room for a $50 total BOM when you add in the cost of the Atlanta.
TranSwitch Vs. the Competition
When reading these charts, keep in mind that they were put together by TranSwitch to portray their competition in the least favorable light. For example, I think defining the DSP block in Mindspeed Comcerto as “soft” with “reduced data throughput” minimizes how powerful this voice processor really is. Nevertheless, there is enough useful information in these tables that it’s worth including them here to help you draw your own conclusions.
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