StarGen Releases StarFabric Software Development Kit V1.0 to Accelerate Time-to-Market for Advanced Switching Features.

Business/Technology Editors

MARLBOROUGH, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 18, 2002

Royalty-Free Source Code Enables System Designers to Add Peer-to-Peer Computing, High-Availability, Quality of Service,

and Multicast Features to Switched Interconnect-Based Systems

StarGen, Inc., a fabless semiconductor company, today announced the availability of the StarFabric Software Development Kit V1.0 to enhance the deployment of StarFabric's advanced switching features. StarFabric is a high-speed, point-to-point switched backplane and chassis-to-chassis interconnect solution for scalable and highly available communication and embedded systems. It can be used to enhance or replace existing bus-based interconnect solutions.

StarFabric provides the ability to realize many switched interconnect benefits while maintaining 100% compatibility to all existing PCI interconnect software. This means no changes or additions to software (including operating system, BIOS, device drivers, or configuration code) are required to take advantage of the base scalability and reliability benefits of a switched interconnect over a bus-based architecture. Utilizing the new StarFabric Software Development Kit, system designers can now easily build upon these base capabilities and leverage the advance features of the StarFabric technology important in communication and embedded applications, including shortest path point-to-point connections, automatic path fail-over, efficient interrupt routing, Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth allocation, and multicast.

Switch fabric technologies offer the potential for significant benefits in system design over traditional bus based architectures. Software is a key consideration in evaluating alternative switch technologies. Unlike revolutionary approaches requiring all new hardware and software infrastructures, StarFabric uses an evolutionary approach that leverages existing investments and maintains the memory-to-memory, load-store software programming model. Additionally the software tool set StarGen is now providing puts the practical use of StarFabric for new advanced system designs well ahead of any alternative open switched interconnect technology.

StarFabric is currently being designed-in across a wide range of market segments, including communication access platforms, control plane for core network switches and routers, medical and military imaging applications, video processing systems, industrial manufacturing and process control systems, and security and test systems. Many of these systems are currently being designed utilizing the StarGen provided Software Development Kit to access the advance features of StarFabric technology.

"As switching and routing systems scale in bandwidth and functionality, there is a corresponding need for higher performance in the control plane," said Russell Johnson, program director of switching & routing semiconductors at RHK. "StarFabric provides system designers with a scalable control plane infrastructure while the associated software tool suite provides easy access to advanced fabric functions."

The StarFabric Software Development Kit is made up of several components, including the Fabric Primitives Library (FPL), as well as bus drivers for Linux, Windows 2K, and VxWorks. The FPL abstracts the low-level details of the StarFabric hardware devices providing a simple programming interface for system designers. The FPL is a library of routines implemented as objects and is source portable to different CPU architectures. The routines perform fabric enumeration and maintenance as well as providing access to advance fabric features, such as bandwidth reservation, dynamic component insertion/removal, fast event vectoring, alternate path generation for re-rerouting traffic, QoS, and multicast.

In addition to the FPL, the StarGen provided software includes bus drivers for Linux, Windows 2K, and VxWorks. The bus drivers provide operating system specific functions to enable architected and device dependant advanced switching features. The StarFabric bus drivers present the operating system and user applications with a comprehensive set of application programming interfaces (APIs) available for full management and maintenance of the fabric. Documentation in the form of the Fabric Programmers Manual is also included in the suite.

"It has been our objective to provide the industry with all the components necessary for system designers to realize the benefits of switched interconnect in their next system design. Software compatibility for base capabilities and a robust, customer-tested tool suite for advanced features are critical components of this strategy. The StarFabric Software Development Kit has been running on real silicon for over nine months and has been used by beta customers since last fall," said Tracy Richardson, president of StarGen, Inc. "StarFabric is the only switched interconnect technology that has all the necessary components available now to solve real world problems."

The StarFabric Software Development Kit V1.0 is available immediately and is included in all StarFabric reference kits from StarGen. It includes royalty-free license to the source code. Customers are free to use, modify, and redistribute the code.

About StarGen

StarGen (www.stargen.com) is a fabless semiconductor company that has developed a new switched interconnect technology for the communication and embedded industries. The technology benefits vendors of carrier and enterprise communication platforms for next generation voice, data, and video networks. Early adopters include those building open standards based access/edge equipment such as media over packet gateways, convergence switches, broadband access concentrators, wireless base stations, cable headend systems, edge routers, and remote access concentrators. Many embedded applications benefit from StarGen's distributed multi-processing features in the areas of video processing; medical, military and scientific imaging; and high performance cluster computing. StarGen's technology provides a dramatic increase in equipment performance, reliability, and Quality of Service while providing for the retention of existing standards-based hardware and software investment. StarGen is headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts.