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StarGen and Dy 4 Systems Announce Strategic Technology Partnership
Dy 4's StarLink PMC Leverages Capabilities of StarGen's StarFabric Switched Interconnect Technology for Implementing Complex Embedded Architectures in Radar, Sonar, and Imaging Applications
MARLBOROUGH, Mass. - June 24, 2002 - StarGen, Inc., a fabless semiconductor company, today announced its strategic technology partnership with Dy 4 Systems of Kanata, Ontario, Canada. As the key benefit of this partnership, Dy 4 Systems, a division of Force Computers, a Solectron company, and a leading designer and manufacturer of COTS VME and CompactPCI products for harsh environments, gains access to StarGen's high-speed, point-to-point switched backplane and chassis-to-chassis interconnect solution, which is called StarFabric. It will be implemented in scalable and mission-critical embedded and communication products, including in Dy 4's new StarLink PMC module. Overall, StarFabric provides scalability, high availability and true quality of service (QoS) while maintaining 100-percent compatibility with existing hardware and software investments.
As a ruggedized PMC module, StarLink has been developed by Dy 4 specifically to leverage the StarFabric high-speed switched interconnect technology for the complex multi-computer architectures found in radar, sonar and digital signal processor (DSP) based imaging applications. StarFabric enables high-bandwidth, fault-tolerant and scalable point-to-point solutions with support for multiple classes of service.
"The combination of Dy 4's DSP technology with StarFabric allows us to provide leading-edge solutions to our customers," said Ian Stalker, DSP product manager at Dy 4 Systems. "With StarFabric, our StarLink product provides a unified data transfer mechanism with features that enable the construction of high availability systems-a critical requirement for military and aerospace applications. In addition, StarFabric provides robust QoS features to help ensure deterministic, real-time behavior in a system-another crucial element of Dy 4's mission-critical COTS solutions."
The StarLink PMC incorporates both the PCI-to-StarFabric Bridge (SG2020) and the six-port StarFabric Switch (SG1010) developed by StarGen. By incorporating the StarFabric Switch directly on the StarLink PMC, the need for an additional dedicated switching card is eliminated. This also provides additional high availability benefits for mission-critical military and aerospace applications that require fault detection and recovery as well as redundancy. A system interconnected with StarLinks provides a rich set of these features, combined with a low-latency, high-throughput data-flow capacity.
From a software perspective, a StarFabric network of bridges and switches acts as a collection of bridged PCI devices. Memory attached to one node is visible in the PCI address space to other nodes in the network. This results in a high degree of software compatibility with less complex PCI-connected systems, which shortens product development time and allows for the simple scaling of existing software investments.
"It has been our goal to enable leading technology providers like Dy 4 to easily incorporate the benefits of a high-speed switched interconnect into their product line," said Tracy Richardson, president of StarGen. "We believe Dy 4's StarLink PMC solution is a perfect fit for the needs of today's COTS designers."
StarGen's StarFabric, which is available and in full production now, is an industry open technology, with licensing available through membership in the StarFabric Trade Association (www.starfabric.org).
About StarGen
StarGen (www.stargen.com) is a fabless semiconductor company that has developed a new switched interconnect technology for the embedded and communication industries. 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. The technology also benefits vendors of 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, broadband access concentrators, 3G wireless infrastructure, and cable headend systems. StarGen is headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
About Dy 4 Systems
Dy 4 Systems designs leading-edge Commercial-Off-The-Shelf embedded solutions. Based on open systems architectures, Dy 4's boards, software and systems are deployed in mission-critical, high-reliability applications. Coupled with best-in-class products, Dy 4 also provides complete lifecycle management, program management and tailored customer support services. Dy 4 is a division of Force Computers, a Solectron company.
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