Tundra Semiconductor Enters PCI Express® Market with Tsi384TM Bridge

This announcement signals further momentum in Tundra's recently announced business strategy, which clearly outlines Tundra's plan to increase the addressable market for Tundra's interconnect products and solutions. 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 Adaptors (HBA), 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 said 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 have 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.



PCI Express is the evolution of the PCI interconnect standard. PCIe is the faster serial version of PCI, and is already designed into virtually every new personal computer and server shipping today. PCIe is a host-centric standard, designed to connect a processor to many I/O devices. Tundra's Tsi384 allows new PCIe based host systems to connect to legacy PCI-X and PCI I/O devices.



Product Features

The Tsi384's PCIe Interface supports 1, 2, or 4 lanes. This enables the Bridge to offer exceptional throughput performance of up to 1 Gbps. System performance is maximized and latency is minimized by the Tsi384's deep buffering and superior queuing architecture. In addition, the device supports a maximum payload size of up to 512 bytes to allow better throughput efficiency. Its PCI/X Interface can operate up to 133 MHz in PCI-X mode, or up to 66 MHz 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 minimize power consumption during operation.



Pricing, Availability and Design Support Tools

The Tundra Tsi384 is general sampling now and will be in volume production later in 2007. The Tsi384 is designed to operate at industrial temperature rated (-40? to +85 ?). The Tsi384 is currently sampling in lead-free RoHS compliant packaging and will be available in both standard and RoHS-compliant packaging at full production. The Tundra Tsi384 will be made available through Tundra's worldwide sales network and at www.tundra.com/buynow . Volume pricing starts at $19 USD.