SAN FRANCISCO -- Carrying momentum from its "First Looks" event in June, the Advanced Switching Interconnect Special Interest Group (ASI SIGT) today released a spate of new ASI-related product and technology announcements from its member companies, including the culmination of several architecture announcements made earlier this year. These announcements further demonstrate the industry's transition from development of ASI, to the implementation of the technology across various platforms.

"We continue to see the tremendous advantages that ASI offers. As more products and solutions are being introduced to market, the demand from our customers is growing," said Yanzhou Li, director of hardware department R&D at Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. "The flexibility, scalability and performance Advanced Switching offers to ease interoperability issues are vital requirements in next-generation networking equipment."

ASI will be a key enabler for many modular-based platforms for compute, storage and communications market segments. Members making ASI-related announcements today include: ADLINK Technology, Agilent Technologies, Intel, Modelware, StarGen and Xyratex.

ADLINK Technology announced the industry's first ATCA single board computer to support Advanced Switching. This offering will propel the industry towards a high-performance, standards-based method for connecting multiple processing and I/O elements in a native PCIe/ASI switched topology. As a result, OEMs now have a solution for applications that require high performance, low latency, redundancy, and PCI software compatibility from their compute element.

The aTCA-6891 from ADLINK implements an ASI dataplane fabric interface, utilizing PCIe-to-ASI bridges, such as the Kestrel bridge device from ASI silicon leader StarGen. This fabric is designed to support a dual star or 5 slot full mesh backplane with four PICMG 3.4 compliant channels. Each channel is a combination of four PCI Express lanes at 2.5 Gbps, providing 10 Gbps of raw bandwidth as well as high-availability features for mission-critical applications. This will be available from ADLINK in Q42005.

Advanced Switching Interconnect SIG (ASI SIG)