StarGen Intros ASI Switch

CHICAGO -- StarGen, the leading developer of serial interconnect semiconductors, today introduced its Merlin ASI Switch silicon and supporting product development suite. Merlin is the industry’s first Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI) compliant switch, demonstrating StarGen’s leadership in this important new market.

StarGen’s AXSys architecture, announced in March 2005, supports both the ASI (www.asi-sig.org) and PCI Express (www.pcisig.org) industry standards targeting chip-to-chip and board-to-board interconnect applications for system OEMs who are developing compute, storage, and communication platforms.

Merlin is designed for use in a wide variety of system applications including line-card interconnect in vendor specific platforms or in standards based hardware systems such as the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (www.picmg.org) AdvancedTCA (ATCA) 3.4 specification targeting PCIe and ASI usage. A single Merlin ASI switch has 80Gb/s switching capacity with the architectural capability to cascade multiple devices to support larger topologies and achieve aggregate system switching capacities up to 400Gb/s. Merlin is configurable in various port widths to meet diverse system needs including ten 8Gb/s (x4) ports or five 16Gb/s (x8) ports. The switch also includes native support for PCIe I/O endpoints by including PCI Express (PI-8) leaf bridges on all of its ports to eliminate the need for any additional bridging silicon.

Other features of the Merlin switch include:

StarGen Inc.