StarGen Announces New Universal Switch Fabric Technology Designed for the Next Generation of Communications Equipment

Uniquely positioned for unification of control and data backplane and for convergence of voice, data, and video traffic

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. - September 11, 2000 - StarGen, Inc. a fabless semiconductor company, today unveiled its technology blueprint and architecture for a scalable, open switch fabric. StarGen has focused its technology on the unique requirements of communication engineers designing for the next generation data, voice, and video networks.

"Our mission is to establish StarGen's universal switch fabric technology as a widely adopted semiconductor solution for communications platforms," said Tracy Richardson, co-founder and president of StarGen. "A universal switch fabric -- one which is compatible with existing standards, is processor architecture-independent, and supports all classes of traffic on both the control and data backplane -- fills a critical need in the high-growth, highly competitive market for communications products."

The initial silicon components leveraging StarGen's technology will include a high throughput switch providing 30Gbps switching capacity with six ports. Bridge chips provided by StarGen and partners will provide access from existing standard interconnects to the advanced functionality of the switch fabric. These devices offer manufacturers a new option for building high-speed, scalable and highly reliable systems. An easy migration path from current interconnects is provided including 100% backward compatibility with PCI.

"StarGen's approach to this market offers designers and manufacturers a clear choice for interconnect fabric," said Warren Andrews of Marketing and Technology Quarterly. "They provide the power and scalability required and support the most popular standards - a winning combination."

High Growth Market at the Access Edge

The StarGen architecture will be available to fulfill the communications industry's expected high demand for Œoff-the-shelf' switch fabrics over the next two to five years. The high growth of the Internet and eCommerce are driving an explosion in demand for high bandwidth network access and core network infrastructure. The access market alone is expected to be $20+ billion in the next three years. More than two million access platforms will be deployed including VoN gateways, DSLAMs, enterprise edge routers, remote access concentrators, cable headend systems, wireless basestations and more; creating a semiconductor interconnect opportunity in excess of $2 billion. These platforms are all candidates for early adoption of StarGen's universal switch fabric technology.

Standard Building Blocks for the Next Generation Voice, Data, Video Network

Today's high-performance interconnects are typically point solutions that can tie up OEM engineering resources, risk time-to-market targets, are produced only in low volume and are expensive. Current standard-based approaches are attractive because they offer ease of design, software availability, multi-vendor support and are available at low cost. However, these bus-based standard approaches are hitting the wall in performance, reliability and scalability; they do not meet the requirements of converged data, voice, and video networks; and they can limit the ability of OEMs to provide differentiated value-added services.

StarGen is providing the next logical evolutionary step to the existing standard solutions, retaining the benefits in availability, ease of design, multi-vendor support, and cost while breaking through their limitations in scalability, reliability and functionality and providing extensibility for differentiated value-add. For example, StarGen allows vendors to break through the current limitations of supporting up to a few thousand voice ports per system to enabling systems with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of ports. It allows them to meet access aggregation capacity requirements as mainstream uplinks transition from multiple OC3 to multiple OC12s, OC 48s and beyond.

"Using StarGen's innovative technology, we will be able to help our customers create the scale of system they are demanding. Such systems would simply be impossible using today's standard platforms," said Brough Turner, Natural Microsystems Founder and Chief Technology Officer.

Adherence to Standards Speeds Time to Market

StarGen's switch fabric technology will provide manufacturers of communications equipment an elegant migration path from existing industry standard bus architectures to highly scalable, reliable, and low cost switch fabric architectures. Backward compatibility with widely available, low cost hardware and software (i.e. PCI, H.110, Utopia, etc.) will be provided. Ease of adoption is also enhanced through the use of existing high volume technology. For example, the StarGen switch fabric can be deployed using existing commodity printed circuit board technology, connectors and cabling. Exotic system design techniques for such things as power, thermal or EMI protection are not required.

"The StarGen switch fabric provides an evolutionary roadmap for extending the existing open standard telecommunication platforms based on the CompactPCI standard," said Jim Medeiros, VP Business Development Ziatech Corporation. "Having been deeply involved in the development of the CompactPCI specifications, I'm excited by the future opportunities that this technology will offer for the standard platform industry, particularly in the area of converged voice and data."

Performance and Scalability to Meet Next Generation Requirements

StarGen's technology allows development of small-scale systems to very large-scale systems with a common architecture. Through use of its flexible switch fabric components, hundreds to thousands of end points can be included in a single system. In the initial implementation, each switch has 30Gbps of switch capacity. The architecture will enable systems to scale to over a terabit per second of capacity. The initial physical layer implemented provides 5Gbps bandwidth for every link. Multiple links can be aggregated to create Œfat pipes' with even greater bandwidth. The links are constructed of four 622Mbps LVDS, bi-directional, differential pairs. The links are well suited for chip-to-chip, backplane, and rack-to-rack interconnect. Using standard category 5 unshielded copper cables the links can extend to over 5 meters in length enabling the creation of room scale equipment.

Quality of Service Enables Unification of Control and Data Plane

StarGen's switch fabric architecture is designed to support seven traffic classes including asynchronous classes, isochronous classes, multicast, and high-priority. Asynchronous traffic is traditional data oriented traffic, with large, bursty bandwidth requirements but without real time delivery requirements. Control and signaling traffic are typically asynchronous. Isochronous traffic, including voice and video, requires deterministic real time delivery. Through use of these traffic classes StarGen's technology is ideally suited for communication applications with converged voice, video, and data requirements, meeting each one's unique service requirements. StarGen allows the unification of traditionally separate interconnects for control traffic and data payload traffic. This simplifies design and lowers cost. Also in many voice or video applications, separate infrastructures are maintained for the real time traffic and the non-realtime traffic - again with StarGen's technology these can be collapsed into a single interconnect architecture.

High Reliability, High Availability to meet telecommunication requirements

With existing standards, creating high availability systems to meet the stringent requirements of the telecommunications industry is virtually impossible, requiring completely redundant architectures with complex proprietary fail-over mechanisms. StarGen's switch fabric provides attributes which allow system designers to design cost-effective highly reliable, high availability systems. It supports hot plug and hot swap of devices so system components can be removed during system operation without affecting the rest of the system. In hardware it provides error detection, isolation, system notification, and automatic fail-over. The flexibility of the architecture allows design of systems with redundant routes, which can be used if primary routes fail.

About StarGen

StarGen (www.StarGen.com) is a fabless semiconductor company that is developing new switch fabric technology for the communications industry. The technology will benefit vendors of carrier and enterprise communication platforms for next generation voice, data, and video networks. Early adopters will include those building open standards based access/edge equipment such as Voice over Network gateways, DSLAMS, wireless base stations, cable headend systems, edge routers, and remote access concentrators. StarGen's technology will provide a dramatic increase in equipment performance, reliability, and Quality of Service while providing for the retention of existing standards-based hardware and software investment.. Founded in February 1999, StarGen is funded by a group of prestigious venture capital companies, including Morgenthaler Ventures (www.morgenthaler.com) St. Paul Venture Capital (www.stpaulvc.com), Commonwealth Capital Ventures (www.ccvlp.com) and Bessemer Venture Partners (www.bessemervp.com). StarGen is headquartered in Marlborough Massachusetts.