IDT expands industry-leading switch portfolio with new family of serial RapidIO Gen2 switches

SAN JOSE, USA: Integrated Device Technology Inc. (IDT), a leading provider of essential mixed signal semiconductor solutions that enrich the digital media experience, has announced a new family of Serial RapidIO Generation 2 (Gen2) switches, which builds on its industry-leading portfolio of Serial RapidIO 1.3 switches.

These new switches are designed to support the Serial RapidIO 2.1 standard and leverage best-in-class technology from the IDT CPS and TSI product lines. The new Serial RapidIO Gen2 switches are ideal for use in the wireless infrastructure, defense, medical and industrial imaging, and professional video markets.

The new IDT Gen2 switches double the data rate up to 20 gigabits per second (Gbps), while reducing power by 40 percent and improving latency to 100 nanoseconds in cut-through mode. The initial products include the CPS-1848 48-lane switch, with 240 Gbps of non-blocking bandwidth for use in large processor clusters or backplanes, and the CPS-1616 16-lane switch, with 80 Gbps of non-blocking bandwidth optimized for line cards and smaller processor clusters.

“IDT continues to demonstrate its commitment to the Serial RapidIO market and our worldwide customer base. With our new Serial RapidIO Gen2 switches, we are enabling pervasive wireless broadband 4G coverage around the world. These switches will help deliver an enhanced wireless broadband experience for the end user,” said Fred Zust, vice president of the Communications division at IDT. “In addition to these switches, IDT is developing PCI Express Gen2-to-Serial RapidIO Gen2 bridges to provide options of connecting Serial RapidIO networks with the vast ecosystem of PCIe-enabled processors.”

“Using the IDT CPS-1848 in our 24-port VPX6-6902 Serial RapidIO/Ethernet Switch, OpenVPX™ backplane switch card, we are able to offer one of the industry’s highest-performance switching solutions, exceeding what we could achieve with either 10 Gigabit Ethernet or PCIe Gen2 switches,” said Lynn Bamford, vice president and general manager of Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing.

“Customers using the VPX6-6902 for radar, sonar and other demanding high-performance applications where OpenVPX™ is deployed will be able to deliver real-time signal processing performance for production systems with more resolution and a better operator experience than existing solutions.”

The CPS-1848 and CPS-1616 were designed to interoperate with the IDT Serial RapidIO Gen2 IP being used in DSPs, microprocessor and ASICs.

“The IDT Serial RapidIO Gen2 IP is used in our next-generation DSPs to interconnect to Serial RapidIO networks, enabling our customers in defense, aerospace, medical imaging, video and wireless infrastructure to design extremely high performance systems with large DSP clusters,” said Ramesh Kumar, business manager, multicore and media infrastructure, Texas Instruments.

The IDT Serial RapidIO Gen2 switches are supported by the IDT Serial RapidIO System Modeling tool for optimizing network architecture, as well as Serial RapidIO Linux open source support and the RapidFET JTAG Edition Software for switch configuration.

The IDT CPS-1848 switch is available in a 29x29mm FCBGA package and is priced at $99 in volume. At $4 per 10 Gbps of data rate, the price per Gigabit is on par with other embedded interconnects. The IDT CPS-1616 is available in a 21x21mm FCBGA package and is priced at $49 in volume.