INDUSTRY

Tundra Semiconductor Corporation, the leader in System Interconnect, announced volume availability of the Tundra Tsi500, a high- performance, cost-effective switch fabric for the wireless, networking and storage markets. The industry's first switch supporting the RapidIO interconnect standard, the Tsi500 incorporates patent-pending technology that allows customers to realize higher throughput while reducing power and overall system cost. "Volume availability of the Tsi500 is a key milestone for Tundra's RapidIO System Interconnect family of products," said Jim Roche, President and CEO of Tundra. "Our commitment to customers is to develop off-the-shelf RapidIO System Interconnect products that deliver high performance and high reliability at low cost and low power." LEADER IN RAPIDIO "Tundra continues to demonstrate that it is the world leader in RapidIO System Interconnect technology," said Iain Scott, Executive Director, RapidIO Trade Association. "The Company has invested in RapidIO technology since the standard was first introduced in 2000, and is one of the founding members of the RapidIO Trade Association. Today Tundra celebrates a tremendous achievement as the first to deliver RapidIO System Interconnect to the market." The Tsi500 has been designed into several development platforms that are being used by large wireless OEMs in North America and Europe as they develop their next-generation communications infrastructures. These platforms include Mercury Computer's Ensemble platform, a RapidIO Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) development system; the RapidIO HIP (Hardware Interoperability Platform) manufactured by Silicon Turnkey Express; and Freescale Semiconductor's Torridon II Platform. "RapidIO switches are the foundation for high-performance systems," said Mark Skalabrin, Vice President and General Manager, OEM Solutions of Mercury Computer Systems. "Data and control traffic flow in future embedded designs will be heavily influenced by the switch architectures in these systems. We look forward to working with Tundra as they continue to roll out their RapidIO System Interconnect portfolio." Companies developing real-time operating systems (RTOS) for embedded technology such as QNX Software Systems and Wind River Systems, Inc., have designed software to support the device. CUSTOMER APPLICATION The Tsi500 is also a building block for next-generation wireless communications infrastructure on a global basis. For example, IPWireless Inc., a mobile broadband technology provider and Tundra customer, is using the Tsi500 to provide a solution within their latest generation of base station products. IPWireless has licensed its technology to one of its partners, a leading wireless base station vendor. "The Tsi500 chipset was used to implement a high-speed interface between the digital cards in our 3G TD-CDMA Node B Base stations," said Roger Nichol, VP Technology, IPWireless, Inc. "We are pleased with its performance and will continue to work with Tundra's RapidIO System Interconnect products." SUPERIOR BANDWITH, PERFORMANCE AND RELIABLITY AT LOW POWER The Tsi500 is the industry's only Multiport RapidIO Switch, delivering a point-to-point, packet-switched interconnect protocol to meet the needs of current and future embedded applications. The architecture of the Tsi500 maximizes throughput for RapidIO applications. It has a number of features that optimize overall board performance. Features of the device include: - Multiple Parallel RapidIO Interfaces - Four 8-bit, full-duplex, double data rate parallel RapidIO interfaces - Operating frequency of 250 MHz for each interface - Performance monitoring and statistics gathering on each RapidIO interface - RapidIO 1.2 Specification compliant - Low power consumption of 3.5 Watts with full traffic loading - Enables simple migration of existing applications to RapidIO - Supports low overhead and low latency through packet-data transfers AVAILABILITY The Tundra Tsi500 Multiport RapidIO Switch is available through Tundra's worldwide distribution network. Documentation, including ordering information, user manuals, reference schematics and software drivers, is available at www.tundra.com .