The Tundra Tsi148™ is the highest bandwidth VME bridge available, providing PCI-X-to-VME 2eSST performance levels while maintaining backward compatibility with older standards.

As the VME chassis continues to evolve, Tsi148 provides the bandwidth required to connect together distributed computing elements. VME systems are using distributed processing elements like CPUs, NPUs, and DSPs in order to manage the thermal density and provide scalability. New standards like VXS and VPX are using RapidIO® interconnect as the data path but in parallel VME bus traffic will also increase because control plane bandwidth scales with data bandwidth.

The Tsi148’s decoupled architecture and proper buffer sizing allows a very large number of simultaneous transactions to take place. The device is also a full featured master/slave and system controller, which allows it to be used in any VME application. Its low power and small package size make it an ideal choice where space and power are concerns.

Business Benefits

Industry’s Highest Bandwidth

Able to sustain speeds of 305 MBps on the VMEbus, the Tsi148 allows customers to build and connect together a more powerful system without experiencing a bottleneck to communication between cards.

Multi-threading

Being capable of simultaneous transactions means that overall system performance improves as neither bus is left waiting for transactions to complete. In addition to handling simultaneous transactions, large internal FIFO buffers help prevent the deadlock conditions that can arise in PCI/X to VME bridges. Furthermore, the Tsi148’s dual independent DMA Controllers support both direct and link-list modes and allow transfer sizes from 1 byte to 4 Gbytes to be executed. DMA transactions can follow any combination of the PCI and VME paths.

Lowest Power

Of course total power consumed depends on how the bus is loaded and how much data is passing through it, but the Tsi148 has the lowest power of any VME bridge chip on the market and is nearly half the power of the popular Universe™ VME bridge chip.

Backwards Compatibility

Customers can upgrade a card at a time and see system benefits as the 2eSST transaction speed can take place along with the traditional VME64 transactions.

Flexible Interfaces

The Tsi148 supports all legacy protocols on both sides of the bridge:

• All VME protocols (VME64, 2eVME, 2eSST) 64-bit data and 32- or 64-bit addressing. A full suite of addressing and data modes is implemented, including BLT and MBLT support.
• All PCI protocols. PCI from 33 to 66 MHz and PCI-X from 50 to 133 MHz. The Tsi148 has a 64-bit data path but can function in a 32-bit system as well. In PCI-X mode, the Tsi148 can support two loads thus reducing the need for additional PCI-X bridges.