December 20141

TechTalk Storage, Net work ing & IoT Journal

1st EditionOctober 2016

Mobiveil, Inc.’s RapidIO Controller (GRIO) End-Point IP has successfully completed pre-silicon interoperability tests with Integrated Device Technology’s (IDT®) next-generation RapidIO switches. The emerging IoT, wearables, and virtual/augmented reality technologies will demand 5G broadband speed. This will fuel new SoC, ASIC, and FPGA designs for wireless network end points operating at the RapidIO 10xN 50Gbps data rates. Mobiveil’s RapidIO Controller (GRIO) End-Point IP assures designers their chips are compliant to RapidIO 10xN Specifications revision 3.1 and will operate seamlessly with the IDT RapidIO switches.

“We launched our 50Gbps switches early this year to deliver the ultra-low latency, high bandwidth and superior energy efficiency for development of 4G LTE Advanced (LTE-A) and 5G wireless infrastructure systems,” said Sean Fan, vice president and general manager of Computing & Communications Division at IDT of San Jose, Calif. “The 10xN RapidIO switches target mobile infrastructure (base stations, C-RAN, mobile-edge compute); data center (data analytics, high-performance computing); aerospace, industrial control and defense. The new switches can increase existing systems’ aggregate backplane bandwidth and will offer designers and architects a compelling solution for future 5G systems. Mobiveil’s IP provides designers a shorter time to market and assurance their designs will seamlessly work with our switches.”

“We are thrilled to provide SoC, ASIC, and FPGA designers compliant RapidIO 3.1 Controller End-Point IP,” said Ravi Thummarukudy, CEO of Mobiveil Inc. “IDT is a leader in the deployment of RapidIO switch solutions and their latest offering reinforces that role. Our RapidIO 10xN controller IP seamlessly integrating with the 50G switches leverages our strong partnership. Our GRIO IP optimizes link utilization, latency, reliability, power consumption in a compact silicon footprint to serve wireless infrastructure, aerospace, industrial control and server requirements. In addition to the Generic RapidIO controller (GRIO) we also provide a sophisticated AXI bridge for easy integration into customers’ SOC.”

Mobiveil and IDT Demonstrate RapidIO 3.1 IP Running 50Gbps

MObIvEIL INC

920, HILLvIEW COuRT, SuITE 250, MILPITAS, CA 95035 PH: 408-791-2977

FAX: 408-457-0406

EMAIL: info@mobiveil.com

MObIvEIL INFO

In this issue

Supercharging The EnterpriseData Center

1 Mobiveil and IDT Demonstrate RapidIO 3.1 IP Running 50Gbps

2 Data Center Trends are Demanding Hardware as Flexible as Software

3 Reduce Latency for a Competitive Edge in Cloud Infrastructure

4 The Industrial IoT: Capturing the Potential

Mobiveil Generic RapidIO (GRIO) controller is a flexible, configurable IP to provide RapidIO interface on one side and a generic interface on the system side. The Mobiveil GRIO Controller can serve as a Host or device. The controller architecture is tailored to optimize link utilization, latency, reliability, power consumption, and silicon footprint. The solution allows licensees to easily migrate among COT, FPGA, Gate array, structured ASIC and Standard cell technologies. The IP with its flexible user logic interface can be easily integrated into a wide range of applications.

Click here for a data sheet.

RapidIO Controller with V3.1 Support

December 20142

Facebook contends that “two billion photos are shared daily on Facebook services,” a huge amount of data that must be stored, indexed, and managed. However, this will be dwarfed by the data tsunami created by the Internet of Things (IoT). In the article “Making sense of Seagate’s decision to tackle the Data Center Interconnect market,” author Desire Athow writes that “by 2020, 44Zb of data will be created, of which 13Zb will need to be stored, however the amount of data that installed capacity will be able to hold will only be 6.5Zb.”

To meet the challenge of accommodating the data tidal wave hurtling toward the data center, data center architects began embracing virtualization and distributed computing using commodity components, running Linux and an open source variant of unix to deliver enterprise-class stability and performance. This trend is best exemplified by huge retailer Amazon and social media giant Facebook among others.

While the virtualization of the server and storage farms is occurring, another transformation is occurring in the semiconductor devices that make up the server and storage farm hardware. This change is required by the need for bandwidth and intelligence to move the data in and out of storage. The first of the bottlenecks is the hard drives, millions of rotating disks drive in large storage farms, that hold the vast majority of all data collected today. Each drive stores bits of data in concentric tracks on a magnetic disk surface with a mechanical actuator positioning a read/write head over the track to store and extract data from the track. Access times to the data stored on these surfaces are on the order of milliseconds.

In his “Fast Company” article, “How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.6 billion In Sales,” author Kit Eaton stated, “Amazon calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. Google has calculated that by slowing its search results by just four tenths of a second they could lose 8 million searches per day—meaning they’d serve up many millions fewer online adverts.”

To break the bottleneck in these data centers demands improving the performance between the servers and large storage farms. The ever-decreasing cost of flash memory made it cost effective in recent times to build high capacity solid-

state drives (SSDs) to act as a cache hiding the latency of mechanical storage devices. by moving frequently accessed data out of rotating storage and semiconductor flash memory chips, data can be accessed in microseconds, thus tremendously reducing transaction times and improving the customer experience.

A Carnegie Mellon study found that for I/O-intensive workloads such as cp, PostMark, and MySQL, NvM

provided an order of magnitude improvement in performance. For data centers doing e-commerce, Internet searches, fraud detection, and other data mining operations, this performance boost has a huge positive impact on their operation.

However, one of the problems solid state drives encountered was the limitation of the interface between the drive and its controller electronics. SSDs employed the same interfaces used for rotating memory devices. Since the latter had built in mechanical limitations, the bandwidth expectations of this interface was not as great as that for solid state storage devices that could move large amounts of data much faster. To break this bottleneck, Intel Corp. led a group that formed the NvM Express Organization and the group released the NvMe specification on October 11, 2012.

Mobiveil was quick to develop NvMe intellectual property (IP) that met the requirements of the standard. In addition to NvMe, the company had also developed a state-of-the-art enterprise flash controller and a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) IP block along with Low-density parity-check (LDPC) error correcting software for flash memory. by providing this IP portfolio, designers building chips to use the NvMe interface could license the all these elements needed in his NvMe flash controller design rather than having to create and maintain them. To date, the company’s IP portfolio has been designed into multiple chips installed in data centers.

In addition, NvMe is also creating a unique opportunity for data center engineers to customize their system solutions to more precisely address the bottlenecks in their data center environment. For example, a data center primarily designed as an Internet search engine will see a different pattern of disk accesses than one primarily aimed at on-line shopping, or one serving multiplayer games.

by Ravi Thummarukudy, CEO, Mobiveil Inc.

Data Center Trends are Demanding Hardware as Flexible as Software

It is not difficult to understand Intel’s

$16.7b purchase of Altera. Data Center

engineers who previously purchased

packaged chip solutions are now

beginning to program in languages used

to design semiconductor chips. However,

rather than fabricate silicon from the

code, the program is loaded into Field

Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)

supplied by Altera and Xilinx. Not only are

the FPGAs highly optimized to accelerate

each data centers’ operation, the solution

also provides competitive advantage.

For data center engineers wanting

to build their own FPGA solution,

Mobiveil has put together a complete

platform—a printed circuit board with

Altera FPGA. The board contains all

the standard hardware and software

elements that enable data center

engineers an accelerated path to product

development. With the platform, the

engineer only needs to add the custom

program he creates for his application

into the FPGA and plug the board into

his server.

Data Centers of today are demanding

the ability to rapidly and flexibly evolve.

Furthermore, in a 24/7 always-on world,

downtime is not an option. Thus, the data

center needs to grow and evolve, while

continuing to serve its online customers.

The application of programmable chips

into the flow of data between server

and data farm has the potential to

meet this rigorous requirement. As the

architecture of the data center evolves

over time, data center engineers simple

reprogram their proprietary algorithms,

remove the old code in the FPGA and

replace it with the new code. Likewise,

as the NvMe interface standard evolves

over time to accommodate faster data

rates, Mobiveil can easily upgrade the

platforms containing its IP with simple

software update.

Evolution of the Data Center

December 20143

The amount of new business opportunities

emerging from the need to accelerate the

movement of data into and out of the large

storage farms comprising the collective

“cloud,” has been unprecedented.

NvM Express (NvMe) has emerged as the key

standard to break the growing bottleneck of

storage access by leveraging high speed low

latency PCI Express (PCIe) technology.

What we saw in the last couple of years is the

transition from hard drives to Flash.

but the key benefit of NvM Express is that

it makes the storage medium transparent

to the Server. It means that many new

interesting device technologies like

3D-XPoint or RRAM could be used as the

storage medium to increase the storage

performance several fold.

So NvMe is creating a unique opportunity

for data center engineers to customize

their system solutions to more precisely

address the bottlenecks in their data center

environment and control cost by mixing and

matching different storage technologies.

For example, a data center primarily

designed as an Internet search engine will

see a different pattern of storage accesses

than one primarily aimed at on-line

shopping, or one serving multiplayer games.

In the light of this dynamic it is not difficult to

understand Intel’s $16.7 billion purchase of Altera.

Data Center operators who previously purchased

standard solutions are now beginning to develop

their own custom hardware using these field

programmable FPGAs.

The trend mirrors that occurring in the

larger data centers where software-defined

networks (SDN) and network functions

virtualization (NFv) is allowing more cost

effective capacity scaling versus massive

investment in replacement hardware.

According to its White Paper, “The Digital

universe of Opportunities: Rich Data and

the Increasing value of the Internet of

Things,” market analyst IDC, declared that

“from 2013 to 2020, the digital universe

will grow by a factor of 10 – from 4.4

trillion gigabytes to 44 trillion. It more

than doubles every two years.”

For semiconductor and system companies,

the indication is clear that they will need

to adapt to new technologies and business

models to take advantage of this rapidly

emerging opportunity.

Reduce Latency for a Competitive Edge in Cloud Infrastructure

IoT: Third Wave of the Internet

In an IoT primer entitled, “The Internet of Things: Making sense of the next mega-trend” issued by Goldman Sachs Equity Research in September 2015, declared that “the third wave of the Internet may be the biggest one yet. There will be a string of new businesses, from those that will expand the Internet ‘pipes’, to those that will analyze the reams of data, to those that will make new things we have not even thought of yet.”

December 20144

The Internet of Things has revolutionized our personal lives, providing us with new levels of convenience, productivity and connectivity. However, the business world has been slower to adapt wireless devices and digital technologies. Here, Ravi Thummarukudy of Mobiveil — a technology leader in the data center, networking and IoT markets — discusses why companies have been slow to embrace the Industrial Internet of Things, and the opportunities that await them once they do. He also describes some strategies for beginning to realize the benefits of emerging IoT technologies today.

This interview excerpt first appeared in Ansys magazine DIMENSIONS — Summer 2016. To read the full interview, click here.

DIMENSIONS: Can you tell us what Mobiveil does, and how the company plays a central role in the Internet of Things (IoT)?

RAvI THuMMARuKuDY: Mobiveil specializes in developing silicon intellectual properties (SIP), platforms and solutions used in data centers, communication networks and many other Internet of Things applications. In essence, we are a fabless semiconductor company. We don’t physically produce chips, but we license our chip design and production technology to customers as an intellectual property. Our customers are leading semiconductor businesses working on complex chip and board designs, but they don’t want to start from the ground up. We provide them with the building blocks they need to deliver speed, capacity, power and other performance features to their customers — who include the leading electronics companies producing technologies for the Internet of Things. because we serve this market, we have a unique perspective on the future of the IoT.

DIMENSIONS: What special engineering challenges have been created by the explosive growth of the IoT?

RT: One of our key focuses at Mobiveil over the past several years has been designing and delivering the right communications and connectivity functions. It’s no longer enough to see each board or chip as an independently functioning unit. In the IoT, everything is connected. The products of company A must effectively communicate with the products of companies b, C and D. In response, we’ve created special algorithms that ensure this integration. These algorithms are the

“secret sauce” that our customers value, because they know that communication and connectivity are being built in from the earliest design stages. We’ve relied on engineering simulation for years to test the performance of our chip and board designs before licensing them to customers. Our licensed knowledge helps ensure that the Internet of Things is robustly engineered to maximize the performance and reliability of connections among all the different “things” that exist in today’s heterogeneous technology environment.

DIMENSIONS: Given your unique perspective, what is the most exciting development you foresee for the IoT over the next several years?

RT: Much of the excitement and buzz about the Internet of Things today centers on the way it will impact our

personal lives. We’ll have connected homes and smart appliances that anticipate our needs for comfort and convenience. Drones will deliver our packages. We’ll be wearing more and more electronics. This captures our imagination, and with good reason.

but I believe the bigger growth area will be leveraging the IoT in business applications — often referred to as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT). Just as smartphones and tablets have revolutionized our personal lives, technology has the power and potential to change our manufacturing facilities, our warehouses, our offices and our transportation networks. unfortunately, the business world has been slower to discover and adopt these emerging technologies, even though the payoff could be enormous. I think we will see this trend reverse itself over the next few years, and we will see companies accelerating their adoption of IoT technologies. Eventually, strategically applying the IoT in an industrial setting will be recognized as delivering a competitive advantage. As market leaders adopt the Industrial Internet of Things, other companies will have to follow suit.

The Industrial IoT: Capturing the Potential

DIMENSIONS: Can you give us some examples of how the IIoT might benefit

the typical company?

RT: Certainly there is

a huge opportunity

for plant automation.

Manufacturers can

gather data about

customer demand,

transportation

capacity, materials

availability and other

real-time business

conditions to run their

production facilities

much smarter and

more cost-efficiently.

Artificial intelligence

can begin to drive

many of the decisions

about what to make,

when and in what

quantity — decisions

that are largely made

by humans today.

Remote equipment monitoring

is another area where the IoT can

make a major contribution. Aircraft

engines, undersea equipment and

implantable medical devices are

just a few examples of equipment

that might be hard to monitor and

control today. by installing sensors

on these types of equipment,

gathering data and analyzing it in

real time, companies can predict and

prevent many cases of mechanical

failure — as well as schedule

maintenance in a more cost-effective

way, based on real-world conditions

and not educated guesses. Future

product development can obviously

be significantly improved if we have

a clearer understanding of how

products are actually performing in

the real world.

Benefits of IIoT forThe Typical Company

by Ravi Thummarukudy, CEO, Mobiveil Inc.