Bustronic, a leading designer and manufacturer of backplanes,
and StarGen, a fabless semiconductor company, unveiled a new backplane
prototype built using StarGen's new switch fabric technology.
The 21-slot StarFabric hybrid backplane was recently demonstrated
at the Applied Computing Conference in Santa Clara.
"Our objective has been to make StarGen's universal switch
fabric technology an open semiconductor solution for communications
platforms," said Tracy Richardson, co-founder and president
of StarGen. Bustronic has recognized the potential of this approach
and has stepped up to the plate to deliver a "home run"
prototype with this 21-slot CompactPCI backplane using StarFabric."
This backplane will be used in CompactPCI proof-of-concept
decisions to highlight the capabilities of StarFabric in terms
of scalability and high availability support for multiple data
types. Systems with this backplane can addresses next-generation
communications equipment requirements such as trunk speed evolution
from OC3 to OC12/OC48 and beyond, allowing 10K to 100K ports
per single chassis. StarFabric supports simultaneous transmission
of packet, cell, and voice (TDM) traffic and provides high availability
features such as fault detection and isolation, hardware fail-over,
and hot swap-ability. The StarFabric solution provides an elegant
migration path from existing bus-based architectures like PCI,
H.110, and Utopia. It is 100% backward compatible to existing
PCI and CompactPCI technology, so new drivers and software do
not need to be created.
See
the datasheet for more details 
