Specifications

About StarFabric Connectivity
14 Aurora Technologies
As shown in Figure 8, the StarFabric-enabled card interfaces virtually reside within
the StarFabric.
FIGURE 8. StarFabric PCI Bus Topology
The legacy PCI buses or other devices lie outside the fabric, relying on the
StarFabric-enabled interfaces to connect to the high-speed switch fabric for data
transmission. This means Aurora’s StarFabric Host Interface cards handle the entire
interface with the StarFabric switch fabric, so the PCI buses and expansion chassis
or other legacy hardware are unaware they are even part of a next-generation switch
fabric. The legacy devices interface with the StarFabric cards the same way they
interface with traditional PCI-to-PCI bridges, so there is full backward compatibil-
ity with your existing hardware.
The StarFabric-enabled cards and buses
reside inside the switch fabric as shown
here using XP-SG expansion chassis and
a PMC-SB card, but the user cards oper-
ate as normal outside the switch fabric.