Surf Communication Solutions Announces General-Purpose Modular AMC Form Factor DSP Resource Board

SURF Communication Solutions® (“Surf”) announced that it has developed the SurfRider/AMC™, a fully-integrated single size ROHS-compliant AMC DSP resource board that provides heavy-duty processing capabilities for developers of telecom, military, medical and other processing-intensive applications. Featuring Surf’s revolutionary patent-pending distributed fabric, modular design and Open Framework™, the SurfRider/AMC is the ideal platform for telecom applications, such as audio and video gateways, media servers and session border controllers, for mobile and WiMAX base stations, for IPTV and video distribution, for military applications, such as cryptography and lawful interception, and for medical applications, such as image processing.

The SurfRider/AMC introduces a highly innovative patent-pending design, featuring the SurfDocker™ modular plug-in, which carries up to four pairs of potentially-mixed types of DSPs and supports a variety of configurations to meet the application developer’s requirements. Up to four SurfDocker modules can be plugged into a single SurfRider/AMC, for a total of eight DSPs per AMC board. This paradigm allows varying types of DSPs to be assembled simultaneously on a single AMC carrier, including TI’s C6000 and C5x DSP platforms, or any new TI processor that is released to market. This flexibility makes the SurfRider/AMC the ideal platform choice from prototype through production stages, since it allows the application developer to start developing without finalizing the specific DSP, the number of DSPs on board, and even the interfaces to the external world.

For developers of telecom infrastructure equipment, the SurfRider/AMC integrates with SurfUP™, Surf’s telecom-ready media processing software. The SurfRider/AMC supports the standards-based PICMG® SFP I-TDM protocol over Gigabit Ethernet for transporting circuit-switched traffic such as PCM voice, fax and modem, and 3G-324M mobile video. This makes the SurfRider/AMC the perfect solution for ATCA, MicroTCA and IBM BladeCenter® platforms in various types of systems.

“Our patent-pending distributed switch implementation, combined with our SurfDocker modular plug-in solution, enables us to support all the cutting-edge interfaces required in the AMC world, such as GigaBitE, SRapid_IO PCI Express, etc., and connect them to any type of present or future TI DSP,” stated Danny Frydman, VP Research and Development of Surf Communication Solutions. “Add to that TI’s exciting DSP roadmap and the result is an innovative AMC DSP farm that is powerful yet flexible and cost-effective.”

“We are excited that Surf is offering a flexible and scalable media processing AMC card using TI’s TMS320C64x™ generation of DSPs as the compute platform for the next generation of AdvancedTCA systems,” said Danny Petkevich, worldwide C6000 platform marketing manager. “The C64x DSP generation enables Surf to scale from low to high channel densities with a single code compatible architecture and with the IO interconnect to scale from low cost 10/100 Ethernet up to high-performance Serial Rapid IO at 10Gbs.”

Availability
Initial SurfRider/AMC boards, supporting TI’s TMS320C6412™ DSPs and the GigaBitE interface, are scheduled to ship by the end of March 2006.