Tsi578 low-latency switching boosts line-card performance

The Tsi578™ Serial RapidIO® switch from Tundra Semiconductor implements system-level features to assist chip-to-chip DSP and processor aggregation, allowing engineers to achieve up to 10Gbit/s interconnect bandwidth between onboard components performing processing-intensive applications.

Tundra has now used the Tsi578 to create the Tsi578-8144AMC-SRIO, a single-width Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC) module that clusters four Freescale MSC8144™ multi-core DSPs. The Tsi578-8144AMC-SRIO enhances performance for developers of wireless and wireline communications systems by taking advantage of the high throughput and low latency of RapidIO. The platform allows more subscribers for each line card, performs processing-intensive applications such as OFDM PHY processing or multi-channel video and voice compression, and also offloads DSP-termination overhead for the data plane.

Numerous system-level features of the Tsi578 helped to streamline integration and interoperability testing for the Tsi578-8144AMC-SRIO. For example, the Tsi578 simplifies board design by using voltage and clock sources similar to those of anticipated companion DSPs. Also, only one clock input is required, thereby reducing the complexity of clockcircuit design. In addition, on-chip laneswapping capability simplifies PCB routing by logically matching lanes in the Tsi578 switch to the ordering of lanes in companion components. These features will benefit many similar processor-aggregation projects, and will also streamline implementation of board-to-board backplane interconnects and chassis-to-chassis interconnects over copper or optical fibre.

Additional benefits of the Tsi578 include lowpower operation, through the ability to tune power on a per-port basis. The device also provides multiple port-width and port-speed options, independent unicast and multicast routing mechanisms, traffic-management features and fabric-performance monitoring.

 

FEATURES Production-ready AMC module for MicroTCA™ chassis High-bandwidth Serial RapidIO data plane Gigabit-Ethernet control plane Redundant interfaces for high-reliability applications

APPLICATIONS Wireless base stations Radio-network controllers Media gateways Video conferencing Radar-signal processing

 

 

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