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StarGen's StarFabric Interconnect Adopted in Numerous Markets
Design Wins, Ranging from Communication Access Solutions to Distributed Computing Platforms to PCI Expansion, Demonstrate Industry's Growing Commitment to the StarFabric Switched Interconnect Technology
MARLBOROUGH, Mass. - October 29, 2001 - StarGen, Inc., a fabless semiconductor company, today disclosed positive acceptance of its StarFabric switched interconnect technology in numerous applications across a variety of market segments. Developed to meet the needs of next-generation communication and embedded systems, StarFabric is a high-speed, point-to-point switched backplane and chassis-to-chassis interconnect solution. Design-in activity underway in a broad set of market segments clearly indicates strong early acceptance of StarFabric as a cost effective, easy-to-adopt solution to the interconnect issues confronting next generation equipment designers.
"The interest in StarFabric solutions has been overwhelming," said Tracy Richardson, president of StarGen, Inc. "We believe it is an indication of the market's need for a practical, cost effective, switched interconnect solution today. The market is looking for a solution that provides a simple migration path from existing bus-based interconnect architectures, allows designers to reuse existing hardware investments and get started without requiring any changes in existing software."
With many features of StarFabric especially tuned for communication equipment, such as support for high availability beyond five-nines, support for simultaneous transport of data, voice and video traffic, and support for true distributed computing architectures, many design wins are in classic communication equipment applications. StarFabric is ideally suited for digital convergence platforms such as voice over broadband gateways, media servers and wireless basestations.
"At Ibus/Phoenix, we see StarFabric complementing our PICMG 2.16 cPSB switched Ethernet solutions by providing TDM (voice) support and support for I/O expansion. As we move to gigabit data rates the PICMG 2.17 specification for StarFabric can support the requirements for a full range of interconnectivity, while retaining compatibility with the existing CompactPCI Bus Architecture," said Johni Chan, vice president and CTO of Ibus/Phoenix, Inc.
In communication access systems, StarFabric provides the opportunity to provide a unified control and data plane. For core transmission equipment where the data plane is typically designed in-house, StarFabric is being designed to provide a powerful, highly-scalable control plane that easily supports rack size high-end optical switches and routers.
In addition to applications within the traditional communication market, StarFabric is well suited for a wide variety of other embedded applications. StarFabric includes robust support for loosely-coupled, distributed computing with support for independent address domains, sophisticated message passing capabilities, memory protection schemes, and advanced interrupt handling. StarFabric is being deployed in distributed computing applications in the areas of medical imaging, government and military command and control platforms, streaming media servers, and storage farms.
"Our customers are looking for flexible system configurations where I/O and processing capability can be scaled independently," said John Matlock, senior vice president of ITOX Applied Computing. "StarFabric fits well with our vision of the future for system design, especially in the telecom and industrial computer markets. We will be showing our initial StarFabric-based products this November at Comdex."
"We see strong interest for StarFabric's technology from our defense and aerospace customers who have distributed computing applications that demand high levels of redundancy and bandwidth. Leveraging StarFabric into a high performance switched fabric over a passive backplane in a rugged environment, has clearly met the market demand for next generation radar, sonar and image processing systems," said Ian Stalker, DSP manager of Dy4 Systems.
StarFabric is also extremely attractive in the area of PCI bus expansion. There are many applications in mobile, desktop, server and embedded computing that simply need to efficiently add more PCI I/O to the system or have additional PCI slots in a remote chassis outside the main system enclosure.
"StarFabric is a very high-performance, scalable fabric that retains PCI compatibility. It allows us to re-use existing hardware and software investments to bring products to market quickly and affordably," said Ted Brewster, vice president of sales and marketing for CGMupac. "At the simplest level, this includes PCI bus expansion. With it we will offer large multi-shelf systems with many processors and I/O subsystems utilizing PCI and cPCI hardware."
StarGen began active sampling of its initial StarFabric components this summer and anticipates production availability this quarter.
About StarGen
StarGen (www.StarGen.com) is a fabless semiconductor company that is developing new switch fabric interconnect 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 scalability, 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.
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