SAN JOSE, Calif. -- StarGen, the leading developer of serial interconnect semiconductors, today introduced its Kestrel PCIe to Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI) Bridge silicon and supporting product development kit. Kestrel is the industry’s first PCIe to ASI bridge and is used to connect PCI Express based host processors to ASI fabrics. This announcement again demonstrates StarGen’s leadership in product development surrounding PCIe and ASI solutions and rounds out the first generation of AXSys switching and software products announced in early 2005. StarGen’s AXSys architecture supports both the ASI (www.asi-sig.org) and PCI Express (www.pcisig.org) industry standards targeting board and system level interconnect applications for system OEMs developing compute, storage, and communication platforms.

Designed to connect to any processor or I/O device with a PCI Express interface, Kestrel provides full function bridging into an ASI fabric. Its ability to simultaneously support multiple data movement protocols and sustain data throughputs up to 16Gb/s makes Kestrel ideally suited for a broad range of system applications including storage arrays, video servers, bladed server platforms, IMS compute elements, and embedded image processing systems. Kestrel has a fully compliant x8 PCI Express interface that can operate at all of the intermediate widths. Its ASI interface supports two modes of operation. For high bandwidth applications, it can be configured as a single x8 port and for other platforms where redundancy or load balancing across two fabric planes is preferred, the ASI interface can be split into two independent x4 ports.

The Kestrel Bridge, specifically developed to provide seamless migration from legacy PCI Express to the powerful capabilities of Advanced Switching, operates as a multi-function device. It can simultaneously support legacy PCI Express traffic while utilizing ASI’s native data movement protocols for peer-to-peer communication between ASI nodes. Data movement can be accomplished through either a simple programmed IO model or with DMA assist. With its two integrated DMA engines and two descriptor ring pairs per engine, Kestrel provides outstanding Inter Processor Communication (IPC). When combined with other recently announced AXSys products, including the 80Gb/s Merlin Switch and the AXSys ASI Software Suite, Kestrel completes the solution for developing high-performance and cost effective compute, storage, and communications platforms based on Advanced Switching and PCI Express architectures.

StarGen Inc.