StarFabric based Processing Platform
High-performance embedded systems are familiar to those who design within telecommunications, wireless, defense-related communications and signal processing fields. While each of these systems has its own unique requirements, they also share much commonality in their internal interconnect requirements.

The very high degree of connectivity required in the systems is an extremely important attribute of high-performance embedded systems. These systems are typically based around backplane architectures with resource boards providing specialized functionally. In the past system OEMs used proprietary in-house interconnects for these applications. Recently the lower-end segments of the market have made use of the PCI inter-connect architecture as a solution for backplane and peripheral connectivity.

PCI was initially developed as a desktop computer technology. CompactPCI has become the popular industry-standard form-factor for the embedded use of PCI. Despite this popularity, CompactPCI suffers from limits on backplane performance, scalability and reliability. As a result, CompactPCI’s PCI bus interconnect has been supplemented by a variety of switch-based interconnects such as Ethernet and StarFabric.

Block Diagram