Bustronic and Arizona Digital Unveil Ultra High-Performance VME Backplane.

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 14, 1997--Bustronic Corporation and Arizona Digital today announced the debut of their patent pending VME320 backplane designed for high-performance systems currently using VME backplanes.

The new backplane transfers data at a rate of 320-Mbyte/second and is also available in a 160-Mbyte/second version, the VME160. With radically new backplane technology allowing synchronous data transmission, the VME320 is more than five times faster than conventional VME64. Unlike the "extended" VME64X, the innovative VME320 is fully compatible with the existing base of VME boards, twice as fast and is much easier to use.

"With our new VME320 technology there are no trade-offs. This is the high-performance alternative," said Fred Hirsch, general manager of Bustronic. "No having to switch to PCI and no hassling with VME extension's ETL compatibility problems. With the VME320's 96-pin DIN connectors, you won't have the expense of using the 160-pin DIN or metric connectors. Fast, robust and able to integrate into any VME environment, our new VME320 is simply elegant."

Drew Berding, president of Arizona Digital stated, "Previously there was talk of abandoning VME for FutureBus and now we hear that CompactPCI is going to take over the world. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I thought `why not improve VME to take advantage of its huge installed base?' While examining VME's limitations, I uncovered the roadblocks and then developed the backplane technology that pushes VME to a whole new level."

Key features of the VME320 backplanes are fully forward and backward compatibility to VME systems, ultra high-speed, thoroughly reliable, easy to use, and less expensive than other recent approaches to high-performance backplanes. Bustronic's new VME320 employs a synchronous protocol which takes advantage of the VME320's high-performance backplane technology.

Ray Alderman, executive director of VMEbus International Trade Association (VITA), added, "Allowing VMEbus systems to quadruple their performance and remain backward compatible to first-generation equipment is a technological milestone. Bustronic and Arizona Digital are in good standing with the Gods of Backplane Physics."

Conventional VME does not utilize synchronous protocol, but uses a robust, fully interlocked protocol for all data transfers across the bus. Although this protocol is reliable there are unavoidably long delays. A single data transfer requires four times the propagation time of the bus plus four times the logic delays in addition to setup and hold times.

The original VME64 was intended to double the standard VME peak data rate by utilizing the 32 Address lines as additional data lines to achieve 8-byte transfers at 10 MHz. VME64 hardware was designed to be compatible with its VME precursor, with the minor exception of the Master and Slave both having to support the special VME64 mode.

With the emergence of PCI backplanes and the emphasis on speed, VME64 is being extended into a newer version. However, what is being termed VME64X is not hardware compatible with the massive installed base of the standard VME.

In attempting to redouble the data rate to 160 MHz, the VME64X requires special Enhanced Transceiver Logic (ETL) driver/receivers, 5-row connectors and subjects itself to great technical risk by using the positive-going edge of the control signals such as DTACK, DS1, DS0, RTRY and BERR.

There is no way to control this positive-going edge as it varies wildly in accordance with a myriad of factors such as loading, supply voltage, temperature and the number of the cards that are plugged in. Also the turn-on and turn-off time of the drivers are different, so using both edges introduces a major source of timing skew in critical signals.

ETL transceivers and custom 5-row 160-pin connectors are expensive and difficult to obtain. The bulky 160-pin connectors also cause the backplane to be perforated resulting in substandard power transmission and leave little room for additional logic such as auto-jumpering.

Bustronic's innovative VME320 is specifically designed to avoid these potential hazards, while utilizing materials and technology that are cost effective and readily available. The new VME320 protocol takes the efficient initial steps of traditional VME protocol but sends data without waiting for an acknowledgement.

Utilizing only the negative-going edges, the VME320 applies two Data Strobes (DS0 and DS1) to drive data along the bus. Each Data Strobe is driven every other cycle. Once the Data Strobes are received by their destinations, they combine into one Data Strobe on the receiving card.

The net result is that the bandwidth required of the lines carrying the Data Strobes are the same as the lines carrying the data. In addition, the VME320 Data Strobes only utilize the well-controlled, safe, negative edges of the signals.

A superlative feature of the VME320 is its defining the DTACK line as an OK_TO_SEND in an unique manner to prevent overrunning the receiver as well as ensuring the data is being not being sent to a destination that is not there.

Holding the DTACK line low, the data source card can stream data out as fast as it wants and when it sees this line go positive, it reads this signal as the FIFOs on the receiving card are getting full and adjusts accordingly.

Initial VME320 boards were fabricated at a standard Printed Circuit board shop using customary materials and assembled using conventional techniques. Exhaustive testing confirmed that even taking all the cards from an I/O intensive VME system that was performing extensive I/O and interrupt handling and transferring them to a cardcage with a VME320 backplane, there was no difference in the system's operation. Testing also highlighted the VME320's almost undetectable low cross talk and signal integrity.

Signal ringing, undershoot and overshoot results were phenomenal. Signal skew between slots is radically reduced and stub length into cards becomes far less critical than with traditional backplanes. While comparison simulation of cards operating on 14" extenders showed traditional VME as highly suspect, the VME320 had excellent waveforms. Similar comparison simulations of Live insertion glitches resulted in the conventional VME having its long standing 1.2 volt problem while VME320 only showed a 300 mv glitch.

Richard O'Connor, Director of Marketing and Business Development for Tundra Semiconductor Corporation said, "As a leader in bus bridging chips and backplane technology, Tundra is eager to investigate and support new technologies, such as VME320, that enable our customers to deliver improved system performance. By increasing the performance of backplane technology, VME will continue to be the industry's dominant open backplane standard."

In test after test, even under the harshest conditions, Bustronic's VME320 backplane proved that it integrates 21st Century high-performance into a simple design which can be easily manufactured and is 100% compatible with the enormous installed base of VME boards.

About Tundra Semiconductor Corporation

Tundra Semiconductor Corporation is a leading provider of PCI and VMEbus-bridging and data security components to international companies. Its major products include the QSpan(TM), the Motorola(R) embedded processor-to-PCI bus bridge; the Eighty-X(TM), the PCI-to-Texas Instruments(R) 'C80 DSP bus bridge; and the Universe(TM), the leading PCI-to-VME bus bridge.

The Company is headquartered in Kanata near Canada's capital city of Ottawa, and employs 55 people. Tundra is an affiliate company of Newbridge Networks Corporation, a world leader in local and wide area Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and time Division Multiplexer (TDM) networking for corporate and public carrier networks.

About Arizona Digital

Arizona Digital is located in Scottsdale, Arizona. The company's president, Drew Berding, has been in high technology design since 1958 and founded several companies, including Advanced Memory Systems (Intersil), Dawn Technology (a turn-key engineering design house) and Ultra Network Technology (200 MB/s channel interfaces to the Cray XMP-48).

Berding designed most of Bustronic Corporation's VME, VXI, ISA, PCI, CPCI and FutureBus product line. Bustronic and Berding enjoy a long-term technical partnership. Arizona Digital granted a license to Bustronic for the VME320 technology.

About Bustronic Corporation

Founded in 1989, Bustronic Corporation specializes in the design and manufacture of high-performance backplanes in its Fremont, California facility. Bustronic has a complete line of custom and industry-standard backplanes, including Compact PCI, ISA + PCIbus, and VME64, VMEbus, and VXIbus. The company's application engineers develop custom backplane designs from initial concept to finished product.

Bustronic is an ELMA Electronic company. ELMA, based in Wetzikon, Switzerland, is a global leader in electronic enclosures and components with facilities or representation in over 22 countries and is publicly traded on the Swiss Stock Exchange. Bustronic is an executive member of PICMG and can be found on the World Wide Web at: www.bustronic.com . -0-

Note to Editors: Photographs may be obtained by contacting Bruce Bedortha at The Loomis Group.

CONTACT: The Loomis Group, Inc.

Bruce Bedortha, 415/882-9494

or

Bustronic Corporation

Fred Hirsch, 510/490-7388

or

Arizona Digital

Drew Berding, [e-mail]