Mercury debuts protocol-agnostic, multi-fabric interconnect technology for Intel embedded computing product line

CHELMSFORD, USA: Mercury Computer Systems Inc. has revealed its revolutionary, protocol-agnostic, multi-standard switch fabric technology called Protocol Offload Engine Technology - POET.

The industry’s first multi-fabric connectivity solution for Intel processors empowers companies to migrate to open solutions, future-proof their applications and guard their investment by ensuring a wide range of standards can be implemented without costly hardware changes.

Leon Woo, Mercury’s Vice President of Engineering, Advanced Computing Solutions Division (ACS), said: “POET is a ground-breaking new technology that aligns with trends in the defense industry that are driving a migration to high performance embedded Intel technology, a crucial factor for high performance ISR subsystems.”

“Building on Mercury’s market-leading success with RACE++ and RapidIO interconnect technology, POET’s open and downloadable multi-fabric support simplifies customization and adds competitive differentiation to our customers’ products while simultaneously embracing open standards.”

At its highest level, POET implements a collection of standard interfaces to create a bridge between processors and switch fabrics. Initially POET will support both Serial RapidIO (sRIO), the overwhelmingly preferred switch fabric for the defense industry and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, the most common commercial fabric.

“The 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabric is traditionally a best-efforts network. By offloading and accelerating standard protocols, POET simultaneously facilitates high bandwidth and low latency operation giving 10 Gigabit Ethernet the guaranteed, deterministic delivery of Serial RapidIO,” said Charlie Frazer, Mercury’s Director of IP Technology, ACS Division.

POET can improve Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) constraints in subsystems by providing local switching in the FPGA between multiple fabric ports to create distributed mesh networks, thereby eliminating the need for a centralized switch fabric card. In future releases POET will support next generation switch fabrics such as 40 Gigabit Ethernet and Infiniband, as well as offload protocols such as RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet), an Infiniband over Ethernet standard.

Through industry standard internal interfaces, customers can integrate their own downloadable firmware with POET to add value to their subsystems, or engage with Mercury’s Services and Systems Integration group to obtain customization services.

POET is one example of the significant investments Mercury is making that brings current and future Intel-based products to radar, EW and EO/IR applications including products based on industry standard 3U and 6U OpenVPX and ATCA form factors.