SAN MATEO, Calif. — Performance Technologies Inc. (Rochester, N.Y.) has taken the PICMG 2.16 standard to new heights with the rollout of a switch board that provides the highest bandwidth and density available on a product that meets the PICMG 2.16 standard for packet-switched backplane systems. The IPnexus CPC6400 board supports 24 Gigabit Ethernet ports, enough to fully populate a CompactPCI 2.16 system running at maximum bandwidth.
Published in September 2001 by the PCI Industrial Computers Manufacturers Group, the PICMG 2.16 standard defines an Internet Protocol backplane system with up to 21 slots in a star topology. Since the spec was released, many vendors have rolled out 2.16-based products, but none have supported the maximum number of slots at full Gbit speeds, according to John Peters, vice president of hardware engineering for Performance Technologies Inc. (PTI).
"Up to now other products at this density have been at the 100-Mbit/second level," said Peters.
The 6U CPC6400 can support up to 19 node slots in a standard PICMG 2.16 chassis, or up to 24 node slots in a PICMG 2.16 extended fabric configuration. Thus a fully populated system using the board has a theoretical maximum bandwidth greater than 40 Gbits/s, Peters said.
The board also supports the PICMG 2.9 IPMI management scheme, as well as selectable integrity checking.
The heart of the CPC6400 is a new 24-port Gbit Ethernet switch from Broadcom Corp. While the Broadcom switch is so new it was still under nondisclosure at press time, the board follows PTI's philosophy of eschewing ASICs to use only off-the-shelf components.
"We have been leveraging the commodity IC market around PCI, and now we are moving into networking silicon," said Peters.
PTI is already working on high-end products for the upcoming PICMG 3.X standard, which will abandon the PCI bus in favor of a passive backplane that can implement a variety of interfaces, including Ethernet, Infiniband and Star Fabric.
The CPC6400 will serve existing customers in telecom, industrial and some military markets. About 30 vendors now have 2.16 products, and roughly a third have Gbit Ethernet cards suitable to populating systems based on the CPC6400.
"We are seeing a lot of interest in new designs, and half of these people are looking at 2.16," said Ed Bizari, director of marketing at PTI.
Analysts project the market for PICMG 2.16 products could grow from about $40 million in 2002 to $500 million in just a few years, a forecast Bizari termed, "fairly aggressive."
The CPC6400 will be available from PTI in June priced at $6,995.
