The StarFabric Trade Association, a non-profit, open membership industry group, was created to develop and promote the StarFabric switched interconnect technology. The founding members represent a wide spectrum of organizations, which together provide the broad and diverse perspective required to ensure StarFabric will continue to meet the dynamic market requirements of next generation embedded and communication systems.

StarFabric, originally developed by StarGen, Inc. (a fabless semiconductor company) with the assistance of the StarFabric Working Group, is a powerful switched interconnect technology for backplane and chassis-to-chassis applications. It enables next generation Embedded Distributed Processing applications to meet market demands. The technology provides for unprecedented levels of scalability, performance and availability in a wide range of systems. It supports multiple classes of traffic adding further flexibility and enhancements to systems while leveraging existing standards-based software and hardware investments.

StarFabric is an open interconnect standard. The StarFabric Trade Association owns the StarFabric Architecture. In addition, the Association worked with the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG) on two open platform architectures. They are PICMG 2.17 CompactPCI StarFabric Specification (ratified in May 2002) and PICMG 3.3 AdvancedTCA StarFabric Specification.(ratified in May 2003)

Elements of StarFabric

Scalable			up to 100's of endpoints (ex: PCI slots) up to Tbps switching capacity bandwidth: 512Mbytes per slot, 11 Gbytes per chassis up to room scale equipment
Compatible			100% backward compatible to PCI, H.110, etc re-use of existing software, chassis, line cards, cables
Quality of Service			bandwidth reservation for real-time traffic simultaneous packet and voice traffic (IP, ATM, TDM) unify control and data planes
Highly Available			redundancy, fail-over, hot plug support for 5 9’s availability, serviceability
Open			unrestricted access royalty free license to Trade Association members