SCIENCE

Integrated Device Technology announced the industry’s first PCI Express Gen2 to Serial RapidIO (S-RIO) Gen2 protocol conversion bridge that extends scalable RapidIO-enabled peer-to-peer multiprocessor clusters to the x86 processor environment. This cutting-edge device brings together the best of two powerful interconnect protocols and opens up new applications and markets for RapidIO. The new device complements IDT’s broad portfolio of Gen1 and Gen2 PCIe and RapidIO switches and bridges, signal integrity products, and world-class timing devices.

The IDT Tsi721 is a 16 Gbps PCIe Gen2 to 16 Gbps RapidIO Gen2 bridge that translates the PCIe protocol to RapidIO and vice versa, allowing existing RapidIO systems in the wireless, defense, imaging, and industrial markets to maintain their high-performance, low-latency, and high-flexibility characteristics while enabling the usage of Intel’s market-leading processors. Conversely, the enterprise cloud computing and server markets that already use PCIe-Gen2-enabled processors can now take full advantage of RapidIO as a backplane interconnect resulting in a powerful solution that is not easily implemented nor scalable with non-transparent bridging techniques for PCIe.

“A highly-scalable, high-performance backplane interconnect is a key factor in cloud computing, imaging, defense, and other high performance computing applications,” said Sergis Mushell, principal research analyst at Gartner. “The availability of new bridge products will allow OEMs in these markets to deploy x86-based RapidIO systems with peer-to-peer clustering, scalability, low end to end system latency, and hardware enabled fault isolation. These features combined with low overall system power could change the economics of deployment in the server and cloud computing markets.”

“RapidIO is the key interconnect in our embedded computing strategy. Our customers demand it for its high-throughput, low-latency, and ease of architecting peer-to-peer processing clusters on board, across backplanes and between chassis,” said Lynn Bamford, vice president and general manager of Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing. “IDT’s new bridge product allows us to combine RapidIO with Intel’s i7 and other leading embedded processors, delivering overall system processing and interconnect performance which was not possible with available native-RapidIO processors.”

The IDT Tsi721 offers 8 direct memory access (DMA) and 4 Messaging engines/channels, each capable of transferring large amounts of data and operating at line speeds of 16 Gbps. This enables the allocation of multiple engines per core or context in a multi-core, multi-threaded system – vastly simplifying system level software development. Furthermore, the device provides a compelling option for system-wide interconnect of Intel-based processors in a distributed multi-processing environment, offering performance that is superior to that of other interconnects such as 10GigE with respect to throughput, latency and overall system-level power.

Pricing and Availability

The IDT Tsi721 is currently sampling to qualified customers and is available in a 13x13mm FCBGA package. The IDT Tsi721 is priced at $49 each, in volume. IDT offers Tsi721 software support for Linux and Windows. Evaluation systems will be available in Q3 2011.