Altera Corp elected to acquire the TPACK Denmark Design Center from Applied Micro April 15. TPACK's work on Optical Transport Network (OTN) standards will allow Altera to enhance its on-chip optical interface work, as well as its OTN IP acquired from Avalon Microelectronics. Altera has the option of giving customers standard products in optical communications under the SoftSilicon label, or designing highly-customized optical communication FPGAs spanning Layers 1 through 4 in the OSI protocol stack.
When TPACK was founded in 2001 in Copenhagen, the small design group specialized in the Layer 2/3 hybrid switching known as Multi-Protocol Label Switching, which still plays an important role in telecom backbone services. But as service providers shifted to an updated Sonet standard called the Optical Transport Network, TPACK shifted its center of gravity to development of mapping and encapsulation designs that unified OTN with Metro Ethernet Forum standards. As Altera began collaborating with TPACK later in the decade, the two companies worked closely in defining FPGA-based mapping solutions.