Santa Clara, Calif. - Mellanox Technologies Ltd. is launching a line of integrated circuits to support both 2.5-Gbit/second (1x) and 10-Gbit/s (4x) links in the Infiniband 1.0 architecture.

The line, which is based on the Infiniband switch fabric, includes switches, host channel adapters and target channel adapters. The parts are said to support reliability, availability, serviceability and quality of service (QoS), and to be scalable.

First to market is the MT21108, which combines a host channel adapter with an eight-port (octal) switch and an Infiniband-to-PCI target channel adapter bridge. It supports both 1x and 4x links, so it offers 5-Gbit/s and 20-Gbit/s bidirectional bandwidth.

Kevin Deierling, vice president of product marketing, said that the Infiniband/PCI bridge should help vendors migrate from PCI to Infiniband without having to abandon their investments in legacy PCI technology.

The new device and the others planned for the Infini-Bridge line are based on a nonblocking, full wire-speed switch architecture said to support multiple virtual lanes (VLs) for data and control plus a dedicated management lane offering QoS, bandwidth allocation and latency guarantees. Deierling said the architecture provides internal bandwidth in excess of 100 Gbits/s. It also prevents head-of-the-line blocking and optimizes fabric throughput by accelerating per-VL, credit-based flow control.

The MT21108 can implement Infiniband subnets that can connect heterogeneous servers with different link bandwidths. An on-chip subnet management agent is said to improve performance and to eliminate the need for an external CPU. Embedded CPU interfaces are included to help designers implement master subnet managers.

Deierling said InfiniBridge will provide a software-transparent bridge between multiple Infiniband links and a 64/32-bit PCI bus operating at up to 66 MHz. "This provides backward compatibility for software originally designed to run in a system based on PCI-to-PCI bridges," he said. "Transparent tunneling of PCI traffic through an Infiniband switch fabric unleashes PCI-based systems and provides for scalability, quality of service and chassis-to-chassis virtual PCI bridges." Deierling said the bridging functionality provides cost-effective, glueless connections to existing PCI-based I/O devices such as 10/100/1000 Base T Ethernet, ATM and Fibre Channel and preserves investments in legacy PCI-based adapter cards and software.

The MT21108 is sampling now, available in a 516-pin PBGA and is priced from $157 in quantities of 10,000. Production is planned for the second quarter.

A product development kit system development board with software is priced at $5,000. The kit includes schematics, layout, bill of materials, signal-integrity simulations and software. The kit can be used by itself or as a PCI add-in card for servers or other PCI-based platforms. Mellanox, which has its headquarters here and engineering in Israel, is also offering a passive PCI backplane for customers developing prototype Infiniband remote PCI systems with off-the-shelf PCI network adapter cards.

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www.mellanox.com
EETInfo No. 613