VLSI Design of FC-1 and FC-2 in Fiber Channel*

Fiber channel (FC) has become a major technology in Storage area network (SAN), especially in enterprise datacenters. In this paper, we propose a configurable and all-around architecture to implement the FC-1 and FC-2 layers in VLSI. The speed negotiation algorithm is also implemented in hardware to automatically switch speed among 4 different speeds. In order to achieve the on-the-fly processing speed, we utilize the hardware to accelerate the processing of FC-1 and part of FC-2. The prototype chip is fabricated in a 0.18um CMOS technology and the core occupies an area of 7.1 ×8mm
²
, The chip has been validated to be fully functional and can achieve 173MBps processing performance.