ARM Community: Infrastructure is the Key to Helping Connect 50 Billion Devices! - ARM Community

The dramatic growth in data bandwidth being used in mobile networks is staggering - analysts expect 50 billion devices will be connected by 2020. Cloud computing and video services are key applications driving this growth. 4G/LTE networks are also transforming the wireless network experience for high-volume data users.

The infrastructure needed to support this growth is faced with challenges as wireless carriers attempt to meet the traffic demands by making investments in enhanced 4G networks and infrastructure. But the explosive growth of content still outpaces the capability of the equipment, creating a gap we refer to as the data deluge. Smart silicon solutions are needed to fill the gap.

And intelligence is what’s been built into LSI’s recently announced Axxia 5500, the first communication processor that combines 16 ARM® Cortex^TM-A15 cores and CoreLink^TM CCN-504 low-latency interconnect with LSI’s specialized acceleration engines. It is specifically designed to intelligently manage as well as integrate many networking functions into a single SoC.

The latest silicon process technology also allows the integration of many cores onto a single SoC, which also reduces the number of components in a system. The processor cores can be closely coupled to hardware acceleration engines, external memory interfaces and high-speed networking I/O. The key to this integration is the interconnect between the different cores and the other functional blocks.

LSI and ARM recently hosted a webinar with Simon Stanley of Light Reading that explores how the interconnect is at the heart of next-generation network systems and system-on-chip (SoC) devices. To meet the rapidly growing processing requirements of wireless infrastructure systems and servers, networking OEMs need highly-integrated SoCs with a heterogeneous mix of CPU cores and accelerators. The webinar explains how these components can be put together for a highly effective solution.

With the demands and growth of wireless use, OEMs who are building networking infrastructure are focused on high-performance and power-efficiency, as well as ways to improve efficiency and time-to-market. To assist in these areas, LSI provides a comprehensive tool suite and production-quality wireless application enablement software. These optimized, high-performance layer two through four software packages provide a complete wireless transport solution for networking OEMs, eliminating the need to invest in data plane software development. The LSI Axxia platform is ideal for OEMs to meet accelerated time-to-market goals and efficiently leverage their development resources for emerging heterogeneous network architectures.

The LSI Axxia 5500 family marks a significant milestone for LSI in networking, providing an exciting and flexible architecture that delivers high performance without sacrificing power efficiency. Those 50 billion connected devices will need all the performance and capacity possible that solutions like LSI’s Axxia 5500 communication processor are paving the way to deliver.


Guest Partner Blogger:

Michael Merluzzi is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager in the Networking Solutions Group at LSI Corporation. He has product marketing responsibilities for LSI’s Axxia® family of multicore communication processors. Previously, he has held a variety of roles in technical marketing, applications engineering and software development.

Michael holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University and master’s degrees in Business Administration and Computer Engineering from Lehigh University.

ARM welcomes its wealth of Partners in the ARM Connected Community (CC) to submit guest blogs to be published on our multiple community blogs. If interested in participating please submit email inquiries to Tell.Us@arm.com.

The ARM Connected Community (CC) is an extensive ecosystem covering all aspects of ARM processor-based design, from chip implementation through to system and device design. The CC provides a platform for collaborative innovation, with multiple types of forums for members to work with one another, and with customers, to solve industry challenges, all with the purpose of enabling designers to focus on differentiating features and an accelerated time-to-market for ARM powered solutions.