Radstone Announces World's Only Fully Switchable, Fully Rugged StarFabric Switch

StarSwitch enables development of scalable, high performance digital signal processing solutions Consolidating its position as a leading player in the market for high performance, multiprocessing embedded systems for military and aerospace applications, Radstone Embedded Computing today announced StarSwitch, the world’s only fully switchable, fully rugged StarFabric switch board. Made in response to significant customer demand, the announcement of StarSwitch demonstrates Radstone’s commitment to leveraging the most advanced technologies while maintaining the value of customer investments. Primarily aimed at supporting Radstone’s flagship G4DSP-XE StarFabric-enabled multiprocessor host, StarSwitch is a multipurpose StarFabric switch and dual PMC carrier card, operating as a 4-port switch to a multi-slot point-to-point passive backplane or chassis-to-chassis connection. It will thus allow multiple G4DSP-XE boards to be combined in powerful, highly flexible configurations including any-board-to-any-board topologies. The G4DSP family has already secured design-ins worth tens of millions of dollars since its introduction. “Other products in this area are effectively operating just as PMC carriers and offer only very simple point-to-point StarFabric connectivity via the StarGen PCI-to-StarFabric bridge,” said Stuart Heptonstall, Product Marketing Manager at Radstone Digital Processing, “but StarSwitch delivers true ‘any board to any board’ switching capability by offering not only the PCI-to-StarFabric bridges but also the StarFabric switches. This allows our customers to develop the highly performant, highly scalable multiprocessing solutions that are required to support demanding signal processing applications such as radar and sonar. We believe the addition of StarSwitch will further enhance the attractiveness of our G4DSP-XE and thus enable it to maintain its position as the industry’s leading digital signal processing solution.” StarFabric is the leading serial switched fabric using current connector technology, allowing customers to take advantage of its outstanding performance without disruptive changes. Radstone’s StarSwitch also, through its capacity to act as a dual PMC carrier card, substantially increases the I/O counts available to them. Key features of StarSwitch include: • Four switched StarFabric ports at the P0 connector • Two 64-bit / 66MHz PMC sites • Both PMCs have all 64 pins of user I/O mapped to P2 or P0 connectors • VME access to both PMC sites • Support for 100 ohm differential pairs to P2 for other high speed I/O • Air- and conduction-cooled, Radstone Levels 1 to 4 StarSwitch’s four P0-StarFabric ports can be used as two pairs of bundled links for small, ultra-high performance systems. Interrupts from the PMC sites are routed either via StarFabric or directly off-board for minimized latency, using an interrupt mapper. StarSwitch’s architecture allows traffic on any port at the P0 connector to be routed to either PMC site or switched (re-routed) off-board. Any number of StarSwitches can be used together with one or more StarFabric-enabled hosts to form large fabric networks. StarSwitch additionally affords VME access to both PMC sites. The on-board bridges allow isolation of each PMC’s traffic from the other. The combination of VME and StarFabric access to PMCs provides a means of separating low latency control plane data from bulk data transfers such as direct memory accesses. Availability of StarSwitch is immediate.