Altera announces new lightweight serial interconnect protocol

Altera Corp. released SerialLite II, a lightweight serial interconnect protocol for chip-to-chip, board-to-board and backplane applications. Designed for the Stratix II GX device family, the SerialLite II protocol supports a performance range of 622Mbps to 6.375Gbps while reducing logic requirements by an average of 65 percent.

SerialLite II delivers a low-cost serial interconnect solution for a wide array of applications, including voice, data and video communication, test and medical, defense, industrial, and high-end computing and data storage.

By understanding the unique requirements of different applications over a widening range of performance points, we were able to define a low-latency, low-overhead protocol with a wider set of configurable features to drive down implementation costs for each customer, said Justin Cowling, Alteras director of intellectual property marketing.

SerialLite II is a point-to-point serial interconnect protocol based on industry-standard 8b/10b encoding, scalable from 1 to 16 lanes at 622Mbps to 6.375Gbps per lane, for chip-to-chip, board-to-board and backplane applications. The protocol includes a flexible architecture to support full-duplex (symmetric), simplex, asymmetric and broadcast operation, and support for either streaming or packet data.

The SerialLite II interconnect protocol is available as a MegaCore function which can be downloaded from Alteras website. A perpetual license for the MegaCore including one year of upgrades and support is bundled with each subscription of the Quartus II design software. The annual subscription for the Altera design software is $2,000 for a node-locked PC license.