John at present this is the best I can do. It was taken from the EET article below written in 1998. It is in the Yahoo cross-post...
Rambus pushes its interfaces into comm apps
Loring Wirbel
San Jose, Calif. - Rambus Inc. is launching a crusade for greater acceptance of
its Concurrent and Direct interfaces in communications applications.
The comms push comes at a time when the Direct Rambus interface is facing
delays in adoption as it competes with synchronous DRAM for main memory in
PCs (see Feb. 2, page 4)
When used to provide fast access to packet memory, however, Rambus
competes only with proprietary solutions or high-end expandable interfaces,
such as the Scalable Coherent Interface.
The dedicated push into communications is still in the early stages, said Subodh
Toprani, vice president and general manager of the logic-products division at
Rambus. The company wants to assign some software engineers to work on
efficient handling of Internet Protocol packets for high-speed transfers. Rambus
also must expand work with fast-channel specialists, such as Adaptec Inc. and
Symbios Inc., to ensure its efforts move beyond Fibre Channel to SCSI, HiPPI
and SuperHiPPI.
Beyond theory
Toprani nonetheless said the effort has moved beyond the theoretical;
real-world designs have emerged from semiconductor companies and OEMs or
are about to emerge from R&D labs. In the fast-channel category, Brocade
Communications Inc., working with LSI Logic Corp., embedded Rambus logic
in the Silkworm Fibre Channel switch. LSI now offers Rambus interfaces as a
standard element of its Fibre Channel ASICs and ASSPs.
In LAN switching markets, Texas Instruments Inc. announced at
NetWorld+Interop that the ThunderSwitch II architecture will be based on a
Rambus interface among a switching-fabric IC, off-chip memory and TMS320
DSPs used as packet accelerators. Berkeley Networks Inc. (San Jose), which
unveiled its Windows NT-based enterprise switch a month ago, has integrated
Rambus interfaces into the eCore ASICs in its systems.
This spring, NEC Electronics Inc. will expand Rambus into ATM architectures,
using the interface as I/O for a high-performance switching element.
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. |
