Tundra and Enea to Deliver System Software Using RapidIO

“Network equipment providers require flexible system architectures that can be easily reused across multiple products lines, scaled to meet increased subscriber demand, and upgraded to deliver new services,” said Linda Thompson, Vice President of Corporate Alliances at Enea. “Tundra’s best-in-class RapidIO technology, coupled with our LINX IPC services, provide a high performance, high-availability platform for deploying converged IP multimedia services that reduce capital and operating expenses for both equipment makers and service providers.”

“We were thrilled to partner with Enea to bring this technology to the communications infrastructure market,” said Daniel Hoste, President and Chief Executive Officer, Tundra Semiconductor. “RapidIO is the right System Interconnect for high bandwidth communications systems and Enea’s LINX over RapidIO will allow our communications customers to deploy new systems to market faster. RapidIO is increasingly penetrating new aspects of our customer’s and partner’s technology and Tundra is meeting the increased demand for its industry-leading expertise, products, and design tools as RapidIO evolves,” continued Hoste.

RapidIO is a leading serial interconnect standard for embedded systems, and is ideal for aggregating and connecting large numbers of microprocessors, DSPs and FPGAs, both on a single board, and on multiple boards across a backplane. Tundra, a founding member of the RapidIO Trade Association and long-time Steering Committee member, was the first semiconductor vendor to bring Serial RapidIO switches to market. These switches, which include the Tsi578™, Tsi576™, Tsi574™, Tsi568A™, and Tsi564A™ provide high performance chip-to-chip interconnect between RapidIO end-points, and can be used to replace existing proprietary backplane fabrics for board-to-board interconnect.

Enea’s LINX provides reliable, high-performance interprocess communications services over physical interconnects like RapidIO. Utilizing direct message passing, LINX makes complex distributed systems easier to conceptualize, model, partition, and scale. LINX scales from DSPs and microcontrollers to 64-bit CPUs, is independent of the underlying processor and operating system, supports control and data plane applications over reliable and unreliable media, and delivers 20% higher performance than competitive IPC solutions. LINX also supports any distributed system topology, from a single processor on a single board, to large networks with complex cluster topologies deployed on hundreds of processors in a multi-rack system.