BittWare Announces First Customer Shipment of Serial RapidIO Endpoint

LONG BEACH, CA – January 16, 2007 – BittWare, Inc., the leading supplier of hybrid (DSP and FPGA) board-level solutions based on Altera's FPGAs and Analog Devices' TigerSHARC® technology, announced today at the Bus & Board Conference the First Customer Shipment of its Serial RapidIO (SRIO) endpoint solution on their B2-AMC. The endpoint is based on Altera's Serial RapidIO IP Megacore® targeting a high-performance Stratix II FPGA, which is then bridged to BittWare's ATLANTiS framework. Combining the superior logic density of Altera's Stratix II FPGAs with the best-in-class performance of Analog Devices TigerSHARC, and the benefits of AdvancedMC and SRIO, the B2-AMC supports Universal Baseband Processing for any Wireless application including WiMAX, Software Defined Radio, and Super 3G.

“BittWare's B2-AMC solution effectively demonstrates the use of Altera's Stratix II family and Serial RapidIO IP Megacore® for high throughput DSP applications,” said Steve Mensor, Sr. Director for IP Marketing at Altera Corporation. “Altera's SRIO IP MegaCore in conjunction with Stratix II devices allows system designers to build high bandwidth SRIO end-point applications or custom inter-processor applications.”

SRIO Endpoint Features

The RapidIO interconnect—an open standard developed by the RapidIO Trade Association—is a high-performance packet-switched interconnect technology designed to pass data and control information between microprocessors, digital signal processors (DSPs), communications and network processors, system memories, and peripheral devices.

“Serial Rapid I/O is a great fit for the B2-AMC's fat pipe interface, allowing our customers to fully exploit the phenomenal processing power and I/O bandwidth capabilities of the hybrid processing architecture on our B2-AMC ”, said Ron Huizen, BittWare's VP of Product Development. “The addition of the endpoint will enable our customers to satisfy the increasing demands of the communications market.”

BittWare's SRIO endpoint consists of Altera's SRIO Megacore bridged to BittWare's ATLANTiS framework. The endpoint features a 4x fat pipe running at 3.125 GHz, which can be shared via ATLANTiS amongst the four TigerSHARCs and/or FPGA processing blocks. Eight bi-directional TigerSHARC link ports, running at 4 Gbits/s each, are connected to ATLANTiS providing a tremendous amount of I/O bandwidth, and a highly efficient means of dealing with the I/O.

“BittWare's B2-AMC demonstrates a high-performance solution to wireless and signal processing; combining Altera's RapidIO FPGA IP and Analog Devices' TigerSHARC® DSP, with industry leading form factor and the high speed, scalable and reliable interconnect of RapidIO Technology”, said Tom Cox, Executive Director of the RapidIO Trade Association.

B2-AMC Features

A full-height, single wide AMC, the B2-AMC is ideal for use in AdvancedTCA®, MicroTCA, or custom systems and is completely hot-swappable. Using the superscalar architecture of the ADSP-TS201 TigerSHARC DSPs, the B2-AMC provides an unprecedented 14.4 GFLOPs and 57.5 GOPS of processing power. The Stratix II FPGA implements BittWare's ATLANTiS framework and the fat pipe interface, seamlessly integrating the DSP processing power with Serial RapidIO™, or any other switch fabric (PCI Express™, GigE, or XAUI™ (10 GigE)).

Availability

The First Customer Shipment occurred in December of 2006 to one of BittWare's telecom customers. The BittWare SRIO endpoint is available today running on the B2-AMC's on-board Altera Stratix II FPGA. In Q2 2007, the SRIO endpoint will also be bundled with BittWare's Stratix II GX-based hardware.

Complete Development Support

BittWare offers a complete suite of development tools to make developing and debugging applications for the B2-AMC easy and efficient. The BittWorks software tools provide host interface libraries, a wide variety of diagnostic utilities and configuration tools, and debug tools. This tool set is comprised of BittWare's DSP21k Toolkit, DSP21k Porting Kit, BittWare Target, TigerSHARC BSP for Gedae, and TS-Lib and SpeedDSP libraries, as well as BittWare's multiprocessing operating environment – Trident.

About BittWare

Founded in 1989, BittWare, Inc. is the leading designer and manufacturer of hybrid (DSP and FPGA) board-level solutions based on Altera's FPGA s and Analog Devices' TigerSHARC® technology. The company provides the essential building blocks required by OEMs for developing and deploying their innovative systems in defense, communications, instrumentation, and life sciences applications. BittWare's product offering addresses OEM needs from prototype-to-production and span a variety of platforms, including AMC, VME, PCI, CompactPCI, PC/104, PC/104-Plus, PMC and standalone. For more information on BittWare and its innovative DSP and FPGA solutions, visit www.bittware.com.

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TigerSHARC is a registered trademark of Analog Devices. Stratix II is a registered trademark of Altera Corp. All other products are the trademarks, service marks, or registered trademarks of their respective holders.