Dolphin's SG2010 PCI-StarFabric Bridge provides an interface between PCI and StarFabric - translating PCI traffic into serial frame format for transmission across StarFabric.  By connecting the bridge's StarFabric ports to other bridges, or to SG1010 StarFabric switches, engineers can design fabric topologies to increase bandwidth, reliability, and the number of endpoints or slots. The PCI port supports a 32 or 64 bit PCI bus and operates at 33 or 66 MHz.

Each StarFabric link can simultaneously transmit and receive at 2.5 Gbps. A standard link is made up of four aggregated 622 Mbps LVDS differential pairs in each direction. Two 2.5 Gbps full-duplex links can also be bundled to create a 5 Gbps full-duplex link.

The SG2010 supports three routing methods. Address routing, which allows PCI designs to be transparently migrated to StarFabric, supports PCI traffic over the fabric without requiring any software development. Existing PCI designs can quickly take advantage of StarFabric's performance and scalability through address routing, and can further enhance performance, features and reliability by moving to native StarFabric routing methods at a future time.  Path routing and multicast routing are StarFabric native routing methods that introduce advanced features like redundancy through failover, Quality of Service, security mechanisms and multi-processor fabrics. Dolphin provides software tools and libraries to take full advantage of these advanced features.

KEY PRODUCT FEATURES

Scalability and Performance

Two StarFabric interface links at 2.5 Gbps, full duplex

Links can bundle to create a single 5.0 Gbps full-duplex point-to-point link

Supports either an 8 channel, 43-bit wide local address space or a 50-bit global address space

Compatibility

Three routing methods:

• Address routing
• Path routing
• Multi-cast routing

Standard PCI addressing supports 100% PCI software compatibility

Design complies with the PCI Local Bus Specification Revision 2.2, the PCI-to-PCI Bridge Architecture Specification Revision 1.1, and the CompactPCI Hot-Swap Specification

Physical layer interface complies with the IEEE 1596.3 and TIA/EIA-644 Low-Voltage Differential Signaling (LVDS) standards

Quality of Service

Credit-based flow control: Path-based (next turn) credits and Class of Service (CoS) Credits

Credit-based flow control guarantees forward progress through the fabric

Separate buffer space for each class at each node

Bandwidth reservation available for real time traffic

Four Classes of Service with separate buffering for each. Supported classes are:

• asynchronous
• isochronous
• multicast
• high priority traffic classes

Design limits head-of-line blocking

Reliability, Availability and Serviceability

Link-by-link CRC checking on all traffic

Fault detection, notification and isolation

Redundant path routing capability, with optional automatic fail-over

Path protection capability for secure operation

Hot-pluggable links

CPCI Hot-Swap support

Additional Features

Supports operation as a root or a leaf node in a StarFabric

PCI bus arbiter supporting up to 9 bus masters

Flexible event dispatch functionality either locally or remotely

In-band PCI interrupt routing with legacy "swizzle" based on device number

Supports software-generated PCI transactions

Supports software-generated StarFabric Special Frames

Supports eight semaphores with six operations per semaphore

SROM and FlashROM interface for register pre-load and power up configuration

IEEE standard 1149.1 JTAG interface

Eight general-purpose I/O pins with accessible registers

LED indicators for each differential pair