MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- StorLink Semiconductors, Inc. to-day an-nounced the Gemini family of network processors that includes the SL3518 which is the industry's first dual-CPU Network Processor with integrated peripherals. The family packs the processing power and integration needed to design systems that can manage the high-speed data and video that are streaming through fiber con-nections into homes and small businesses (i.e., SOHO/SMB markets) at speeds of 100 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s.
The patent-pending SL3518 provides 800 MIPS (400 MIPS per CPU) of 32-bit proc-essing power with a dual-bus architecture that allows engineers to design Internet Protocol Set Top boxes, Voice over Internet Protocol Gateways, Media Servers with RAID, Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Gigabit Router Gateways.
The SL3518 is a mixed-signal device that represents a major milestone in the design of Systems-on-Chip (SOC) by integrating functions such as a TV controller, dual Gigabit Media Access Controllers, dual USB 2.0 interfaces, PCI interface, dual IDE (PATA and SATA) hard-drive controllers, DDR memory controller and a proprietary NetEngineTM TCP/IP protocol accelerator. The hardwired NetEngineTM protocol accelerator speeds the processing of NAT (Network Address Transla-tion), QoS (Quality of Service), IPv4/IPv6 routing and forwarding, deep packet parsing and filtering, segmentation and TCP/IP offload functions while providing flexibility through user control.
According to Dr. Stewart Wu, President and CEO of StorLink, "The home and small businesses now need systems that were once used exclusively in large enterprises. With fiber optic links now coming to the neighborhood and directly into the home, the Internet is becoming a fountain of data with rates that are capable of reaching 100 Mb/s 1 Gb/s per household. These massive multimedia data streams contain television video, radio programs, digital photographs, digital books and telephone conversations. The volume of data is now reaching the point where a home router or gateway is needed to store and distribute these vast amounts of data among the many computers that reside in home.
"Enterprise technology such as RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) is now needed to protect home mass storage which holds precious digital data such as family photo-graphs and videos. Making this enterprise technology priced for homes and small business has required a major step in both integration and software development. Our seasoned team of semiconductor and software engineers has met this challenge by packing the processing power and functions into a chip along with the protocol software which eliminates a major cost in system design."
StorLink Semiconductors Inc.