Mercury Computer Systems announced a family of starter kits for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) developers, at the Military Embedded Electronics and Computing Conference (MEECC) in Long Beach, CA. Mercury also announced details and availability of the first starter kit in the series, which is based on its performance-leading PowerStream 6100 series RapidIO VXS multicomputer. "The RapidIO-based PowerStream 6100 VXS Starter Kit pre-integrates PowerPC digital signal processing, FPGA compute resource cards, and high-speed I/O with a robust software environment," said Eran Strod, Director of Product Marketing for the Defense business at Mercury. "Our customers tell us that they often spend 6 to 12 months of precious development time integrating modules from disparate vendors and tweaking drivers and middleware. Our Starter Kit allows customers to plug in, power up and go." The PowerStream 6100 VXS Starter Kit provides developers with the basic hardware and software building blocks to develop embedded, high-performance sensor applications for military and commercial environments. The Starter Kit includes the PowerStream 6100 VXS chassis, up to three quad 1 GHz PowerPC 7448 processor-based high-compute density (HCD) boards, two serial RapidIO switch cards, a host/PMC carrier, a 12-channel digital receiver, and a software bundle that includes the complete Mercury MCOE software environment. Mercury first demonstrated its PowerStream 6100 multicomputer at the Bus and Board conference in January 2006. Systems were already shipping to customers at that time. The PowerStream 6100 stands apart in the embedded industry as the first and only multicomputer solution based on the Serial RapidIO fabric and compliant with the VXS (VITA 41.2) form factor standard. At 761 GFLOPS and 42 GB/s sustained fabric throughput, the PowerStream 6100 sets a new record for performance available in the tried-and-true VME form factor. The VXS standard is backward-compatible with the VME64 standard, providing defense integrators with a seamless migration path to future systems that support a high-speed serial switched fabric. PowerStream 6100 delivers "compile-and-go" compatibility with the Mercury RACE++ Series 6U VME64 multicomputer, which is based on the Mercury MCOE open software environment. MCOE is an integrated and sophisticated development environment comprising tools, libraries, and middleware that runs on all Mercury PowerStream series solutions; it is used by thousands of developers worldwide in diverse multicomputer applications. MCOE on the PowerStream 6100 supports the Linux and VxWorks operating systems in addition to MCexec; the ubiquitous and robust POSIX-compliant real-time kernel from Mercury. Mercury also announced several other Starter Kits in its road map: * Radio Frequency 6U Starter Kit for high-performance radar and signals intelligence applications that require an L-band, VHF/UHF receiver * VXS Tranceiver Starter Kit based on FPGA processing elements * Software Defined Radio 3U Starter Kit * Cell Broadband Engine Starter Kit * Linux-based MCOE Starter Kit * Pentium M processor PMC (PrPMC) Starter Kit The Starter Kit series expands Mercury's comprehensive offering for high-performance heterogeneous processing, FPGA computing, system fabrics and open standard software and interfaces. The Starter Kit series incorporates critical elements from the Echotek and Momentum Series product families, further demonstrating the synergies achieved through Mercury's acquisition strategy. The PowerStream 6100 VXS Starter Kit is available today within standard lead times. For more information on the PowerStream 6100 VXS Starter Kit, visit Mercury in Booth #10 at MEECC, visit its web site, or contact Mercury at (866) 627-6951.