Mellanox and TSMC Collaborate on ConnectX-2 Adapters

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that its ConnectX-2 family of adapters, recently released for general availability, leverages TSMC‘s PowerTrim service to achieve power performance of 4.5W for dual 10GbE ports.

The technology is part of Mellanox’s energy-efficient data center initiative and delivers a 20 percent overall power leakage reduction in Mellanox’s current generation of adapter products. PowerTrim is a patented power optimization technology platform based on TSMC’s advanced manufacturing processes to reduce leakage in devices manufactured on TSMC 90nm and smaller process geometries.

ConnectX-2 delivers up to 30% less power consumption than its predecessor, while delivering I/O convergence features to reduce number of I/O ports, cables and equipment deployed in growing data centers. Together, these efficiency features help data centers to lower their power and cooling costs for server and storage I/O. ConnectX-2, with its integrated NIC and PHY, provides additional cost and power saving by minimizing board real-estate.

"Delivering additional hardware features such as ultra low-latency, integrated PHY technology, T-11 compliant FCoE, and SR-IOV virtualization support into our latest ConnectX-2 platform was a critical product goal," said John Monson, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "We were able to add these additional features and reduce power using PowerTrim to deliver both best-in-class performance and industry-leading power consumption."

ConnectX-2 brings the highest bandwidth and lowest latency available to high-performance and transaction-sensitive applications. The InfiniBand adapter products deliver up to 40Gb/s of bandwidth with latencies as low as 1 microsecond. The Ethernet adapter products support both 10 and 40GigE with 6 microsecond TCP latency or less than 2 microseconds RDMA and kernel bypass application latency. ConnectX-2’s Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) unified I/O technology provides a one-wire solution for any networking, clustering, storage and management application with an enhanced quality of service to guarantee high application productivity.

The advanced virtualization capabilities of ConnectX-2, with Hypervisor offloads and a complete PCI-SIG Single Root I/O Virtualization (SRIOV) technology implementation, free up CPU resources helping each virtual machine to achieve native operating system performance, while resource isolation and protection ensures virtual machine security. In addition, ConnectX-2’s support of FCoE and FCoIB enables I/O consolidation over Ethernet or InfiniBand in data center environments, and benefits IT Managers with a path to a simplified, cost-effective data center to manage and support.

"Reducing power consumption and associated heat dissipation have quickly become key considerations by our data center customers. By working closely with TSMC and Tela Innovations under the PowerTrim program, we were able to reduce power leakage while improving yield," said Tzvika Shmueli, director of backend chip design at Mellanox Technologies. ‘We are encouraged by these excellent results and plan to expand our use of PowerTrim technology."

PowerTrim technology reduces leakage by adjusting gate length on non-critical paths for speed without compromising chip area and cuts leakage power variation that results in improved parametric yield. Designers use PowerTrim to perform speed/power tradeoffs. The gate biases are implemented by TSMC as part of the Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) flow and do not impact the footprint of the cells or chip area.

"Working with customers like Mellanox and partners like Tela Innovations is the heart of TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform’ initiative. We look forward to continuing this collaboration on future designs," said S.T. Juang, senior director, Design Infrastructure Marketing at TSMC.

Availability
ConnectX-2 adapter products are available today in a variety of configurations. ConnectX-2 VPI delivers both InfiniBand and Ethernet with auto-sensing or preconfigured QSFP and SFP+ ports. ConnectX-2 EN delivers 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and ConnectX-2 ENt delivers 10 Gigabit Ethernet with integrated 10GBASE-T PHYs.

PowerTrim is available directly and exclusively from TSMC for advanced process technologies including the 90nm, 80nm, 65nm, 55nm, and 40nm nodes. Tela’s technology is exclusively embedded in PowerTrim.