IDT PCI Express to RapidIO bridge and RapidIO switch selected by StarBridge

SAN JOSE, USA: Integrated Device Technology Inc. (IDT) announced that StarBridge, Inc. has selected IDT’s PCI Express Gen 2 to RapidIO Gen 2 bridge and RapidIO Gen 2 switch for its RapidExpress products that enable easy aggregation of high performance compute and I/O nodes via a high speed RapidIO network at 20 Gbaud per link. The IDT-enabled RapidExpress solutions are ideal for prototype and production systems in industrial, imaging and server applications.

The IDT Tsi721 PCI Express (PCIe) to Serial RapidIO bridge is at the heart of the StarBridge RapidExpress bridge card solution, enabling the translation of the PCIe protocol to RapidIO and vice versa at up to 20 Gbaud. The PCIe protocol allows for Intel, AMD and other PCIe-enabled processors to be used in a large peer-to-peer multi-processing environment, while the Serial RapidIO protocol provides a scalable, high-throughput, low-latency, fault tolerant interconnect for straightforward architecting of peer-to-peer processing clusters. The IDT solution offers superior throughput, latency and overall system-level power as compared to solutions for other interconnect protocols such as 10GigE and InfiniBand.

In addition, the RapidExpress bridge card is complemented by the StarBridge RapidIO switch box, which utilizes the IDT CPS 1432 to provide eight x4 Serial RapidIO Gen 2 ports via Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP) connectors with support for copper or optical transceivers. Eight processor node systems can be connected with one RapidExpress switch and eight bridges. Larger systems can be created by simply cascading multiple switch boxes with up to 64K endpoints.

“The StarBridge RapidIOExpress bridge and switch products using the IDT Tsi721 and IDT CPS1432 are ideal for customers to quickly develop large multi-processor systems with Intel or other PCIe enabled CPUs using a RapidIO network,” said Fred Zust, VP of the Communications Division at IDT. “The combination of these StarBridge products, enabled by IDT silicon, allow customers to create scalable, low latency, reliable systems that are not possible using other interconnect technologies.”