Tracy Richardson, Todd Comins, Dave Mayhew, Lynne Brocco, and Tim Miller founded StarGen (formerly StarBridge Technologies) in February ’99 “to deliver the communications industry’s next generation interconnect technology to facilitate the evolution toward integrated data, voice and multimedia networks in an open telecom environment.” The company’s mission is “to establish StarGen’s universal switch fabric technology as a widely adopted semiconductor solution for communications platforms.”

In July ’99, the company closed $6 million in first-round funding from St. Paul Venture Capital, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners. In July 2000, the company raised $20 million in second-round funding from the first round investors and new investors Morgenthaler Ventures and Boston University Community Technology Fund. Additional capital is not anticipated for some time. The company has approx. 30 employees and will grow to 40 soon.

Stargen is targeting the access platform market, in contract to most switch fabric startups that we have covered, who are targeting OC-48 an OC-192 core switching platforms. Although the access market is not as sexy as the core market, it has tremendous volume potential. According to industry analysts, more than two million access platforms will be deployed including VoN gateways, DSLAMs, enterprise edge routers, remote access concentrators, cable headend systems, wireless basestations and more, creating a semiconductor interconnect opportunity in excess of $2 billion.

Many access/edge platform vendors rely on interconnect standards such as PCI, Compact PCI, and H.110 to bring products to market quickly. However, these standards have limitations, including scalability, reliability, and lack of support for multiple types of traffic. StarGen has developed a scalable and open universal switch fabric that is compatible with existing standards, is processor architecture-independent, and supports all classes of traffic on both the control and data backplane. Its interconnect technology will enable an order of magnitude increase in equipment scale and port density while providing for the retention and reuse of existing standards-based hardware and software. The StarGen solution can be used to create new platforms that utilize a fully serial point-to-point backplane, upgrade existing platforms by creating multi-bus segments, or scale existing chassis by providing multi-chassis interconnect.

The switch fabric architecture supports 7 traffic classes including asynchronous, isochronous, multicast, and high-priority. Isochronous traffic, including voice and video, requires deterministic real time delivery. StarGen integrates real time and non-real-time traffic into a single interconnect architecture and also allows the unification of traditionally separate interconnects for control traffic and data payload traffic. Routing methods include address, path and multicast.

The switch fabric also supports high reliability/availability features including hot plug, hot swap, error detection, isolation, system notification, and automatic hardware fail-over. The architecture enables the design of systems with redundant routes, which can be used if primary routes fail.

Bridge chips provided by StarGen and its partners will provide access from existing standard interconnects, such as PCI, to the switch fabric. The solution will be backward compatible with widely available, low cost hardware and software such as PCI, H.110 (TDM), and Utopia/ATM and provides an evolutionary path for extending telecom platforms based on CompactPCI.

The initial switch fabric chip, Star, has 6 ports and 30 Gbps of switching capacity. By utilizing multiple Star chips in various configuration, hundreds to thousands of end points can be included in a single system. The architecture will enable systems to scale to over a terabit per second of capacity. Three Bridge devices can be connected directly together, without utilizing a Star fabric. A single Star chip supports a 6 port system and a second Star chip can be added to support redundancy. Multiple Star chips can be utilized to support many configurations with varying degrees of redundancy. And each Bridge chip can support many end-points as well.

The Star switch fabric communicates with bridge devices via the 6 StarProtocol ports. The initial physical layer interface for the StarProtocol port provides 5 Gbps bandwidth (2.5 Gbps full duplex) for every link, based on four 622 Mbps LVDS, bi-directional, differential pairs. Multiple links can be aggregated to create ‘fat pipes.’ In contrast to bleeding edge milti-Gbps links, StarGen’s conservative 622 Mbps links can be deployed using existing commodity PCB technology, connectors, and cabling. The links are well suited for chip-to-chip, backplane, and rack-to-rack interconnect. Using category 5 unshielded copper cables, the links can extend to over 5 meters in length enabling the creation of room scale equipment.

A PCI-to-Serial Bridge chip will translate PCI traffic into the StarProtocol. The device features two 5 Gbps StarProtocol ports and a PCI interface that supports 32- or 64-bits, 33- or 64-MHz, and 3.3V or 5V operation.

Prototypes of both the Star switch fabric and PCI-to-Serial Bridge will be available in Q1 2001 with revenue shipments scheduled for Q2 2001. The initial components will be less than $50 @ 1Ku. Lucent will manufacture the devices on a 0.16u process and will provide SERDES blocks for these designs.

The switch fabric roadmap includes devices that will support more bandwidth and more links, both slower and faster links (in various combinations), and 10 G+ links. The Bridge roadmap includes devices for bridging TDM, ATM/Utopia, GigE, and DSP traffic. TDM and ATM partner discussions are under way with announcements expected soon. Other product directions include integrating the StarProtocol interface directly into various network processors provided by StarGen’s partners. The company plans to directly target access/edge customers like Nortel, Lucent and Cisco, as well as partner with CompactPCI application platform providers like NMS, Ziatech, Sun, and Motorola.

Tracy Richardson, President (previously GM of Digital’s Semiconductor Bridge product line that was acquired by Intel in May ’98)

Todd Comins, CTO (previously technical director and ‘inventor’ of Digital’s PCI-to-PCI Bridge products)

David Mayhew, Ph.D., Principal Architect (previously worked at AT&T, Alcatel, IBM, Digital, Intel, Virginia Tech, and BYU)

Lynne Brocco, VP of Engineering (previously engineering manager for PCI Bridge products at Digital)

Tim Miller, VP of Marketing (previously marketing director for Digital’s high performance microprocessor business)

Richard Riker, VP of Sales and Business Development (previously director of sales for Intel’s Communications & Embedded Systems Group and VP of worldwide sales for Digital’s Semiconductor Unit)