Critical I/O announces offloaded IPv6 capability with XGE silicon stack Ethernet interface

IRVINE, Calif., 29 Jan. 2007. Critical I/O, a provider of high-performance interfaces for embedded, military, and avionics systems, has announced support for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) within its Silicon Stack Ethernet interfaces. The interfaces offer wire-speed performance to next-generation systems requiring seamless operation within existing IPv4 and future IPv6 networks.

The Critical I/O XGE 4032 PMC offers hardware offload of IPv6 connections, enabling Ethernet data networks to satisfy even the most demanding real-time system applications such as radar, data acquisition, mission computers, sonar, FLIR, and SIGINT data, video distribution, and signal processing.

"All existing processor-based alternatives use a software stack to implement all network stack protocols including IPv6, and that approach simply is not viable for high-performance or real-time systems," says Jack Staub, chief executive officer of Critical I/O. "Engineers have attempted to apply Ethernet to real-time systems for years now, and nearly all have been disappointed with poor throughput, high transfer latency, non-deterministic behavior, and excessive CPU loading. These problems are entirely due to Ethernet's TCP/IP software stack, regardless if the stack is running on the processor itself or a separate processor PMC. Three years ago we introduced Silicon Stack Ethernet to address this problem head-on in order to make Ethernet a high-performance data network and now we've added native IPv6 support."

Silicon Stack Ethernet offloads the entire TCP/IP protocol stack (Ethernet, TCP, UDP, IP, iSCSI, and RDMA) in dedicated silicon, freeing the host processor completely and allowing for wire-speed throughput, microsecond latency, and solid determinism. The XGE Silicon Stack architecture sports an integrated firmware-based protocol engine that permits easy protocol extensions and customization. (See figure above.)

The XGE4032 processor interface features a dual-channel design in PMC and conduction-cooled PMC form factors. It offers interoperability and compatibility with standard Ethernet components.

The XGE4032 Silicon Stack Ethernet PMC interface is currently available from Critical I/O with extensive software library and driver support for real-time and standard OS platforms running on a wide range of embedded computing platforms.