Four-lane bridge for backwards cmpatibility

Four-lane bridge allows new PCIe based host systems to connect to legacy PCI-X and PCI I/O devices.

Tundra Semiconductor's Tsi384 four-lane PCI Express (PCIe) to PCI-X Bridge is pin-compatible with competing PCIe bridge products but offers superior performance, lower latency, better throughput and lower power consumption than the competitive offering.

Customers already sampling Tundra's PCIe Bridge confirm that the product delivers outstanding performance.

Tundra's new computing and storage business unit expects the Tundra Tsi384 to penetrate multiple markets around the world, such as: server motherboards, server add-in cards, storage host bus adapters (HBAs), routers and single board computers.

"Tundra's first PCI Express Bridge is a welcome addition to our product family".

"We continue to expand the number of markets Tundra serves".

"With each new product launch, our customers can expect Tundra to provide a quality product that out-performs the competition", says Benny Chang, Tundra's Chief Technology Officer.

"As always, Tundra's products are backed by world-class customer service and support and with short, reliable delivery times, are designed to get our customer's products to market ahead of the competition".

Tundra's new design centre in Hyderabad, India, working closely with the engineering teams in North America has designed this new product to compete and beat industry-leading PCIe bridges.

Tundra's benchmarking results show that the feature-rich Tsi384 has successfully set new performance standards in system throughput and latency for PCIe bridges.

The Tsi384 allows new PCIe based host systems to connect to legacy PCI-X and PCI I/O devices.

The Tsi384's PCIe Interface supports one, two or four lanes.

This enables the bridg to offer exceptional throughput performance of 1Gbit/s.

System performance is maximised and latency is minimised by the Tsi384's deep buffering and superior queuing architecture.

In addition, the device supports a maximum payload size up to 512 byte to allow better throughput efficiency.

Its PCI/X Interface can operate up to 133MHz in PCI-X mode, or up to 66MHz in PCI mode.

This interface offers designers extensive flexibility by supporting three types of addressing modes: transparent, opaque, and non-transparent.

Non-transparent bridging is needed for applications such as intelligent I/O adapters that have a processor on the secondary (PCI/X) bus.

The Tsi384 has typical power consumption of 1.3W, and incorporates power management to minimise power consumption during operation.

The Tundra Tsi384 is general sampling now and will be in volume production later in 2007.

It is designed to operate at industrial temperature rated (-40 to +85C) and is currently sampling in lead-free RoHS compliant packaging.

The Tundra Tsi384 will be made available through Tundra's worldwide sales network and at www.tundra.com/buynow .

Volume pricing starts at US $19.

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