The new products further extend the breadth of solutions available from the IDT flow-control management effort by leveraging the company’s switching, buffering, and standards-support strategies.  IDT has been aggressively driving products and ecosystem development for its standards-based switching thrust, featuring PCI Express™ and Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI).  Since initially communicating the company’s standards-based switching and interconnect strategy in April 2004, IDT has announced its PRECISE^TM family of PCI Express products and released a portfolio of system packet interface (SPI) packet-exchange devices.  The forthcoming devices will utilize Serial RapidIO to interface with devices, such as DSP and embedded processors, which integrate that standard.

According to Jag Bolaria, analyst with The Linley Group, “IDT clearly understands, and has plans to leverage, the role of various standard interconnects to specific markets.  The inclusion of Serial RapidIO to optimize support of DSP clusters complements the company’s programs for PCI Express and ASI.”

“IDT understands its customers’ needs and is committed to meeting their application requirements with the right standards-based products,” said Phil Bourekas, vice president of worldwide marketing for IDT.  “Our strategy is to leverage appropriate standards for the application and implement specific devices optimized to those needs.”

IDT Targets DSP Clusters in the Wireless Space

Serial interfaces have become popular among DSP vendors in wireless infrastructure applications, because resulting products offer high bandwidth per pin, offload packet termination and/or data manipulation and enable more integrated function-specific products.  The new product family will leverage the Serial RapidIO interconnect, based on its inclusion in newer generation DSP devices.

“IDT has established a solid reputation of providing solutions for data-flow buffering in DSP clusters with its specialty memory products,” said Thomas Brenner, vice president and general manager of the IDT flow-control management division.  “Our new products will extend our core expertise to develop communications ICs for next-generation systems.”

Previously Announced IDT Standards-Based Switching and Interconnect Products

Optimized to meet the critical needs of server and storage markets, the PRECISE family of PCI Express solutions will be the first to provide cost-effective PCI Express I/O expansion and bridging.  The PRECISE family is offered at price points that meet the needs of mainstream server and storage system OEMs, with the intent of lowering the overall cost per Gigabyte of switching.

The IDT 88P8344 packet-exchange product, part of the company’s flow-control management (FCM) category, is the industry’s first device to integrate switching, aggregation and rate adaptation of four lower rate SPI-3 interfaces to the higher rate SPI-4 interface in VPN firewall cards, Ethernet transport and multi-service switches.  The company has since introduced additional packet-exchange devices that solve a myriad of interconnect problems in core/metro/edge-based networking markets.  The family comprises integrated solutions supporting 10 Gbps packet processing and offers a wide range of options for logical port density and buffering capabilities, ranging from low-latency SPI-4-to-SPI-4 switching through complexflow-control designs requiring SPI-4 data overbooking and aggregation.

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