StarGen Plays War Games

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. -- StarGen, a semiconductor company that develops advanced serial switched interconnect solutions, announced that BAE SYSTEMS will use its StarFabric architecture as the backplane interconnect solution for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) line of electronic warfare systems. The JSF program is the Department of Defense's next generation strike aircraft weapon system for the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and U.S. allies. StarFabric is a high-speed, point-to-point switched backplane and chassis-to-chassis interconnect solution for scalable and highly available embedded systems.

BAE SYSTEMS believes StarFabric allows them to provide a homogeneous communications structure between processing elements and hardware based functional elements in support of the F-35 electronic warfare system.

"We're pleased that BAE SYSTEMS chose to utilize StarFabric in the design of its F-35 electronic warfare system," said Tracy Richardson, president and co-founder of StarGen. "We designed into our StarFabric architecture exactly the features that such mission-critical applications need - specifically ease of design, high availability, cost-effectiveness, and compatibility with existing software investment."

To date, StarGen has shipped tens of thousands of StarFabric ports to over 50 companies worldwide. These systems represent a broad spectrum of applications including military and aerospace designs. Its initial StarFabric portfolio includes the SG1010 StarFabric Switch and the SG2010 PCI-to-StarFabric Bridge - both of which are in volume production today.

Lockheed Martin is developing the F-35 in conjunction with its principal industrial partners, Northrop Grumman and BAE SYSTEMS. Companies worldwide are participating in the F-35's development.

In a separate release:

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- StarGen, a semiconductor company that develops advanced serial switched interconnect solutions, will be exhibiting at the Network Processors Conference (NPC2003 West) in San Jose, CA this week. StarGen is focusing its presence on the benefits of standard, off-the-shelf PCI-compatible interconnects as ideal control plane solutions. These include StarFabric today and PCI ExpressTM and Advanced Switching over the next several years.

StarFabric, available today, has many of the features that will be incorporated in PCI Express and Advanced Switching when it is available. Its serial nature and flexible topology allow scalable high performance. Reliability features, including redundancy and hot swap capabilities as well as its PCI compatibility and ease of software migration, makes it ideal for control plane applications in enterprise and carrier communications equipment. In addition, StarFabric imposes a much lower processor overhead than competing technologies.

"NPC West is a great venue for demonstrating StarFabric's robust high-availability features -- capabilities required for scalable, redundant control planes by today's communication equipment developers," said Tracy Richardson, president of and co-founder of StarGen. "In the future, these qualities will also be available in StarXpress, our highest performance fabric, based on the PCI Express and Advanced Switching specification."

At the NPC West show, StarGen will demonstrate a CompactPCI system that highlights some of StarFabric's advanced features, including legacy PCI support, distributed multi-processing, hot swap, path redundancy and quality of service capability. StarGen is joining with other industry leading companies in the PCI ExpressTM Community section of the show floor to promote the Advanced Switching Interconnect being developed to extend the capabilities of PCI Express. The Advanced Switching Interconnect is being defined by the newly announced ASI Special Interest Group (SIG). StarGen is a key contributor to SIG, providing the expertise of the key architects of StarGen's StarFabric technology.

StarGen's SG1010, StarFabric Switch, and SG2010, PCI-to-StarFabric Bridge, are currently available and in production.

The Network Processors Conference (www.networkprocessors.com) will be held Tuesday, October 21st through Thursday, October 23rd at Parkside Hall, across from San Jose's McHenry Convention Center in San Jose, CA. NPC2003 West will focus on the combination of hardware, software and applications that are of concern to manufacturers of switches, hubs, routers, accelerators, interface cards, and other network communications devices.

StarGen Inc.