StarFabric Adopted in Spec

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. -- StarGen, a semiconductor company that supplies advanced serial switched interconnect solutions, announced today that the executive membership of PICMG® has voted to adopt the StarFabric interconnect, originally developed by StarGen, as part of its new Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA(tm)) family of specifications (ratified as PICMG 3.3). In addition, PICMG standardized the PCI Express(tm) interconnect for AdvancedTCA within PICMG 3.4. Todd Comins, StarGen CTO, and Steve Christo, StarGen product marketing manager, served as co-chairman and co-editor of both these committees.

"We're very pleased PICMG has standardized StarFabric as part of its AdvancedTCA series of standards," said Tracy Richardson, president and co-founder of StarGen. "This further leverages StarFabric's attractiveness in open standard platforms building upon the popularity of PICMG 2.17 which standardizes the use of StarFabric in the CompactPCI platform standard. We see PICMG 3.3 as ideal for applications deployed with today's proven StarFabric technology with the ability to field upgrade to add Advanced Switching capabilities in the future."

AdvancedTCA is the industry's first open standard for carrier grade equipment using high-speed switched interconnect technology. This series of specifications incorporates the latest trends in high-speed interconnect technologies, next-generation processors, and improved reliability, manageability, and serviceability. StarFabric and PCI Express join two previously adopted AdvancedTCA fabric specifications. These subsidiary specifications build upon the PICMG 3.0 Base Interconnect Specification, which defines the overall system architecture including mechanicals, power, thermals, and system management.

The PICMG 3.3 specification defines the electrical environment for StarFabric as a fabric interface for AdvancedTCA system applications. StarFabric is a high-speed, point-to-point switched backplane and chassis-to-chassis interconnect solution for scalable and highly available embedded systems. StarFabric is providing solutions today across a wide set of applications such as medical imaging, video serving, communication access, military command and control, automatic test equipment, and storage systems.

Both PICMG 3.3 and 3.4 support future use of the Advanced Switching interconnect specification currently in development by the Arapahoe Consortium. StarGen has been an active contributing member of the working group developing the Advanced Switching specification. Advanced Switching adds protocol agnostic switching, multiprocessing, high availability and other functionality to PCI Express and is the high-speed future roadmap for StarFabric.

StarGen Inc.