Advanced Switching Further Expands Reach and Adoption; Consortium Membership Continues to Climb, Advanced Switching Prominently Featured at Major Industry Tradeshows.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Advanced Switching Interconnect Special Interest Group (ASI SIG) today announced that it continues to reach a number of industry and technology milestones. The recent introduction of ASI silicon, software, tools and test equipment, combined with the rapid adoption of PCI Express, has expanded the ecosystem required for ASI-based storage, compute and communications platforms. This movement has further ignited the widespread industry support of ASI technology across various platforms. Further, this momentum has been supported by broad ASI adoption by board vendors and system integrators such as ADLINK and Kontron, who recently joined the ASI SIG and announced supporting products.

--ADLINK Technology announced the industry's first ATCA single board computer to support Advanced Switching. This offering will propel the industry towards a high-performance, standards-based method for connecting multiple processing and I/O elements in a native PCIe/ASI switched topology. As a result, OEMs now have a solution for applications that require high performance, low latency, redundancy, and PCI software compatibility from their compute element.

The aTCA-6891 from ADLINK implements an ASI dataplane fabric
        interface, utilizing PCIe-to-ASI bridges, such as the Kestrel
        bridge device from ASI silicon leader StarGen. This fabric is
        designed to support a dual star or 5 slot full mesh backplane
        with four PICMG 3.4 compliant channels. Each channel is a
        combination of four PCI Express lanes at 2.5 Gbps, providing
        10 Gbps of raw bandwidth as well as high-availability features
        for mission-critical applications. This will be available from
        ADLINK in Q42005. For more information visit:
        www.ADLINKtech.com

--KONTRON recently announced the first ever AdvancedTCA Base and Fabric Hub Board - the Kontron AT8901 - on the market to be built with support for both Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and ASI switch fabric options. Built with the Merlin ASI Switch module from StarGen, a leading provider of serial interconnect semiconductors, the Kontron AT8901 provides ASI connectivity to the fabric interface, and represents a major milestone for Telecom Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs) and Independent Software Developers (ISVs) who plan to develop new telecom applications based on a true ASI platform. For more information visit: www.kontron.com.

"The ASI SIG and its members are responding to industry demand for further information by having developed tutorials and demonstrations with real products to educate users about the advantages of ASI technology," said ASI SIG President and Intel's Advanced Switching Initiatives Manager, Rajeev Kumar. "The availability of silicon, tools, IP, FPGA's, software and board level products this year by our members has sparked the start of new product designs across the storage, embedded, computing and communications market segments."

NSDC and ASI SIGnature World Tour

Building on the success of Intel Developer Forum (IDF) Fall, which featured more than seven dedicated hours of ASI training, demonstrated interoperability between multiple ASI vendors and displayed fabric management software running over an ASI fabric, the ASI SIG has a number of additional events on the schedule for late 2005 and early 2006 including:

--Network Systems Design Conference (NSDC) in San Jose, California. A full panel of ASI SIG members has been invited to present a three-and-a-half hour tutorial of the technology at 1:30 p.m. on October 18, 2005, in conjunction with exhibiting at booth number 421. The panel will provide a basic introduction to ASI and its various uses, and discuss ASI market direction and ASI chip and board-level implementation.

--AdvancedTCA Summit on December 6, 2005 in San Jose. ASI member StarGen will lead an issues roundtable discussion on interconnect technologies.

--The ASI SIGnature World Tour. The traveling ASI SIG seminar series will kick off in Boston on December 13, 2005, and travel through China, Japan and Europe throughout February and March of 2006. Attendees will learn: the basic features and capabilities of ASI, how the technology aligns with standard modular platforms like ATCA and AMC, and how it differs from other interconnect technologies. In addition, attendees will be able to see working hardware/software platforms demonstrating backwards compatibility to PCI Express, fabric management, peer-to-peer communication and supplier interoperability.

For more information about the seminar series or to register for any of the events, visit www.asi-sig.org.

New Board Members

The ASI SIG has also named StarGen and Xyratex to its board of directors. Xyratex and StarGen join other ASI SIG board members: Huawei, IDT, Intel, Siemens and Xilinx.

"As an OEM supplier, Xyratex can offer a unique perspective to the ASI SIG BoD regarding Advanced Switching technology," said Will Leonard, executive vice president of business development at Xyratex. "As the ecosystem grows, we have seen a corresponding increase in the level of interest in the technology."

About Advanced Switching

ASI technology, based on PCI Express, enables the standardization of proprietary backplane architectures. Common physical-link and data-link layers with the PCI Express standard enable the ASI technology to exploit a vast ecosystem of products currently available in the market. ASI defines a new transaction and upper layer protocol designed from the ground up, to meet the requirements of carrier-grade applications. Key capabilities include peer-to-peer transfers, protocol-agnostic encapsulation and multiple mechanisms for flow control, congestion management, failover and quality of service. Industry analysts credit the innovative nature of the standard, as well as the ubiquity of PCI Express technology, to the rapid growth and adoption of ASI.

About the ASI SIG

The Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI SIG) is a non-profit collaborative trade organization tasked with developing and supporting a switched interconnect and data fabric interface specification for communications, storage and embedded equipment, termed Advanced Switching interconnect (ASI), based on the PCI Express architecture. The ASI SIG's board of directors and members, comprised of industry leading equipment manufacturers and semiconductor and tools vendors, has surpassed 60 members to date. In addition to ongoing technical development of the specification, these member companies help to define, develop and market ASI. Different membership levels provide differing levels of influence, involvement and responsibility. The overall tasks performed by the members of the SIG include establishing broad industry awareness, ongoing technical development and enabling rapid industry adoption through training programs, ecosystem development and interoperability and compliance testing. (The board of directors includes Huawei, Intel, IDT, Siemens, StarGen, Xilinx and Xyratex. More information can be found at www.asi-sig.org.)