StarGen announces availability of ASI EndPoint Core for Xilinx FPGA

Allows system OEMs flexibility to integrate Advanced Switching Interconnect technology with their unique IP in industry leading FPGAs

SAN FRANCISCO, CA. – March 21, 2006 – StarGen, the market leader in Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI) solutions, announced general availability of FPGA core IP that provides ASI endpoint functionality to application specific silicon. This highly efficient core is currently targeted to Xilinx Virtex 4-FX series FPGAs. Subsequent releases will support additional platforms including Altera products. Design documentation for both platforms is available now.

System OEMs in storage, application server, embedded, and communication markets often require cost effective FPGAs in their designs to implement proprietary functionality that performs better and more economically than standard processors or high cost ASICs. With the advent of merchant PCI Express and Advanced Switching Interconnect fabrics, the market has demanded proven FPGA cores that implement the advanced data movement features of these standards and provide seamless connectivity with market leading IC implementations.

StarGen’s FPGA ASI core is highly optimized to require the minimum amount of slices and provides FPGA designers with the maximum amount of headroom for their application needs. While the StarGen core is highly customizable, the base implementation only requires 7000 slices. By comparison, published specifications of other FPGA cores that support only PCI Express-Base functionality consume 5,500 slices. In addition, the core is designed to be used with the Xilinx Rocket IO PCIe physical layer transceivers, for guaranteed performance and inter-operability.

“As the industry continues to embrace industry standard interconnects, OEMs demand cost effective interfaces that they can quickly integrate into their designs with confidence in interoperability and implementation quality, said Steve Christo, Director of Strategic Marketing at StarGen. “Our early customers have told us that since the FPGA core is based on an actual ASIC implementation of StarGen’s KestrelTM PCIe to ASI Bridge, they have high confidence in implementing the ASI core into their platform.”

Customers implementing the ASI core receive the following:

• ASI Endpoint IP that is fully compliant with the PCIe and ASI specifications and implements the Simple Load Store (SLS) data movement model
• RTL that is supported in ModelTech and Synopsys simulation environments
• Full Test Bench with Verilog interface to the user interface
• Xilinx netlist targeted to Virtex 4-FX series
• All timing constraint files
• PowerPC firmware to support ASI event services that is user extensible for adding application specific registers

Availability and Pricing

The ASI core is available now. Pricing starts at $30,000 with optional design services and extended support available.

About Advanced Switching

Advanced Switching is an important new interconnect technology, collaboratively developed by the ASI-SIG, an industry organization with over 60 member companies from the semiconductor, systems equipment, and test and measurement industries. ASI is finding initial applications in the system architectures of bladed compute servers, enterprise storage and embedded applications. Advanced Switching is totally compatible with PCI Express and extends its tree interconnect model to a switch fabric topology incorporating the best features of high performance proprietary architectures with the economics and infrastructure of volume, off-the-shelf, semiconductor components.

About StarGen

StarGen, based in Marlborough, MA, is a fabless semiconductor company providing high-performance interconnect solutions for compute and communication markets. StarGen’s AXSys product line is based on the Advanced Switching Interconnect and PCI Express standards and targets system OEMs developing platforms for compute, storage and communication applications. StarGen’s successful 1st generation product, StarFabric, extends legacy PCI applications and is currently in use in over 75 designs with greater than 250,000 ports shipped around the world. Additional company and product information is available at www.stargen.com.