Tundra releasing PCI/X-to-VMEBus bridge

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada— Tundra Semiconductor is launching what it reports is the industry’s first PCI/X-to-VMEBus bridge. Tundra Tsi148 is the next VME component in the firm’s VMEbus System Interconnect portfolio. This bridge was jointly developed with Motorola Computer Group, a division of Motorola Inc., as part of the VME Renaissance program. Tundra worked with early access partners in the evaluation and testing stages of product development. The device has been released to production and will be available to all customers in August 2004.

‘General availability of Tundra Tsi148 to is a key milestone in the VME Renaissance program,’ says Jerry Gipper, Motorola Computer Group’s marketing director. ‘It also reinforces Tundra’s ongoing commitment to the VME market.’

Tundra’s VME system interconnect devices are used by single-board computer vendors and OEMs, which serve the telecommunications, military, aerospace, industrial automation and medical markets. Tundra reports that Tsi148 delivers the bandwidth, performance and reliability that embedded systems customers require for their increasingly sophisticated VME applications. For example, Tsi148 delivers a sustained transfer rate of 305 Mbps in 2eSST. The PCI/X interface complies with the PCI-X 133 MHz specification; provides superior bus efficiency; and can handle a number of streaming transactions, while eliminating potential system bottlenecks. Fully backward compatible with legacy VMEbus systems, Tsi148 PCI/X-to-VMEBus bridge preserves current VME infrastructure investments, while enabling them to bring their next generation products to market.

‘Our VME customers have demonstrated a high level of interest in the Tsi148,’ says Tim Warland, Tundra’s VME product manager. ‘They have told us that the Tsi148 has the right feature set at the right time for them.’

Tsi148’s architecture maximizes PCI/X transactions for VME applications. To optimize bus utilization and overall board performance, its other features include:

• Multithreading, which makes it capable of a number of simultaneous transactions;

• Full-featured master, slave and system controller, which can be used in any VME application;

• PCI-X local bus that supports two loads at 133 MHz, reducing component count;

• Small device footprint to save board space; and

• Proven VME backwards compatibility to preserve legacy investment.

In addition, Tsi148 provides an increase in overall processing capability on legacy backplanes, while transparently enabling high-performance distributed processing that new applications demand. Tsi148 also bridges PCI or PCI-X on the local bus to the VMEbus. It eliminates performance bottlenecks by operating as a peer with other devices on the local bus. This can reduce the total number of bridges that VMEbus product vendors and end-users require for bandwidth management on the host card.

On the system interface, the Tsi148 operates in master or slave mode for traditional VME, 2eVME and 2eSST transactions. These protocols are industry standards developed by the VMEbus International Trade Association (VITA) of which Tundra is a member.

Control Engineering Daily News Desk
Jim Montague, news editor
jmontague@reedbusiness.com

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