Ottawa, Ontario – July 12, 2005 – Tundra Semiconductor Corporation (TSX:TUN), the leader in System Interconnect, today announced the immediate availability of the Tundra Tsi148 bridge with a full industrial temperature rating. The Tsi148 is the industry’s leading PCI/X-to-VMEbus bridge and the successful next-generation offering to the Tundra UniverseTM II, the leading VMEbus bridge for embedded systems customers. The availability of an industrial temperature-rated Tsi148 allows Tundra’s customers with challenging thermal environments in military and communications applications to perform system qualification at higher ambient temperatures up to +85°C.
Tundra continues to demonstrate its investment in its VMEbus bridge product line, confirming both its commitment to customers and partners. The addition of this Tsi148 variant strengthens Tundra’s market leadership position as the leading supplier of VME System Interconnect. In addition to the Tsi148, the Tundra VME System Interconnect portfolio also includes the SCV64TM bus bridge and the Universe II bus bridge. All are available in commercial and industrial temperature ratings.
“Tundra is the world leader in VME interconnect technology with more than ten years experience in providing VME solutions and technical support to the embedded systems industry,” said Rick O’Connor , Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Product Management at Tundra. “The availability of an industrial temperature-rated Tsi148 is another example of our continued and strong commitment to customers to ensure our products deliver the performance and functionality they require.”
In addition to providing both commercial and industrial temperature-rated products for its VMEbus bridge product line, Tundra announced in August 2004 that it would be providing lead-free (Pb-free) packaging options for the majority of its System Interconnect product portfolio. The Tundra product options are compliant with the European Union RoHS (Restriction on Use of Hazardous Substances) legislation. This legislation, which is to come into effect in July 2006, specifies the use of substitute materials for several hazardous substances, including lead, that are currently in use. The Universe II is available now in a lead-free package and Tundra expects samples of its lead-free Tsi148 and SCV64 to be available in early 2006. For more information on Tundra’s Pb-free/ RoHS compliant products, please visit www.tundra.com.
Availability And Pricing
The Tundra Tsi148 with an industrial temperature rating (Tsi148-133IL) is available now through Tundra’s worldwide sales network. Documentation, including ordering information, user manuals and software drivers, is available at www.tundra.com/tsi148. For volumes in excess of 1000 parts per year, the Tsi148-133IL is priced at $300 USD.
Tsi148 PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
The Tsi148 maximizes PCI/X transactions for VME applications. The Tsi148 provides an increase in overall processing capability on legacy backplanes, while transparently enabling the high-performance distributed processing that new applications demand. The device has a number of features that optimize bus utilization and overall board performance. Features include:
* Industry’s best sustained transfer rate of 305 MB/s in 2eSST – higher system bandwidth
* Multithreading – capable of a number of simultaneous transactions while optimizing bus utilization
* Full featured master, slave and system controller – can be used in any VME application
* PCI-X local bus supports two loads at 133 MHz – reducing component count
* Small device footprint – saves board space
* Proven VME backwards compatibility – preserves legacy investment
The Tsi148 bridges PCI or PCI-X on the local bus to the VMEbus, while eliminating performance bottlenecks by operating as a peer with other devices on the local bus. This can reduce the total number of bridges that VMEbus product vendors and end-users require for bandwidth management on the host card. On the system interface, the Tsi148 operates in master or slave mode for traditional VME, 2eVME and 2eSST transactions. These protocols are industry standards developed by the VMEbus International Trade Association (VITA) of which Tundra is a long-standing member.
About Tundra
Tundra Semiconductor Corporation delivers standards-based System Interconnect for use by the world’s leading vendors of wireless infrastructure, networking, storage and pervasive computing systems. Tundra System Interconnect allows customers to link critical system components while compressing development cycles and maximizing performance. For more information, please visit www.tundra.com.