Support Grows for Advanced Switching Specification

Twenty more companies have joined the Arapahoe Work Group, an industry consortium developing the Advanced Switching specification. Advanced Switching is a switched interconnect and data fabric technology based on the PCI Express architecture for joining components and system boards in low-to-midrange communications and embedded applications. The PCI Express architecture, builds on the highly successful PCI standard, is designed as a general-purpose chip-to-chip interconnect technology.
It uses the same physical and link layers as the PCI Express architecture. However, at the transaction layer, Advanced Switching is optimized to provide an array of specialized communications features, including high-availability functions, peer-to-peer and multicast networking, congestion and system management, scalability, and support for virtually any networking protocol.


Intel said it plans to adopt the proposed Advanced Switching specification into a wide array of its communication products, including network and storage processors, Ethernet controllers and chipsets that support embedded Intel architecture.


New companies joining the Arapahoe Work Group include Agere Systems, Alcatel, Altera Corp., EMC Corp., Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi Ltd., Huawei Technologies, National Semiconductor, Nokia, Petalynx, OSE Systems, PMC-Sierra, Siemens AG, Sun Microsystems Inc., Synopsys Inc., TeraChip Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., Vitesse Semiconductor Corp., Xyratex and ZettaCom..
http://www.intel.com
http://www.express-lane.org.