Altera has acquired Avalon Microelectronics, a provider of flexible Optical Transport Network (OTN) IP, for use in its FPGA and ASIC products. With the acquisition, Altera expands its portfolio of customizable IP solutions for OTN applications, supporting data rates at 1.2G, 2.5G and 10G, as well as 40G and 100G.

As communications network bandwidth requirements grow exponentially to support video data (which comprises over 90% of consumer traffic), service providers need equipment providing flexible provisioning and seamless upgradeability for next-generation standards, such as 100G and 400G. The optical wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) equipment market is expected to grow from $6.7B to $10.4B, or 56 percent from 2010 to 2014, with 40G and 100G deployments leading the way(1). Because new optical protocol standards are being developed simultaneously with new equipment design, equipment manufacturers require flexible hardware solutions using FPGAs with future cost-reduction paths such as Altera's HardCopy ASICs.