Fibre Channel To PCI Express Links SAN/NAS

June 8, 2006

PMC-Sierra's Tachyon QE4 targets storage-area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) applications by bridging between one or more PCI Express hosts and two or four 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel links. Each link typically will be tied to a host processor while the PCI Express links are connected to the storage RAID control processor. A pair of Tachyon QE4 chips usually is employed if the control processor is attached to Fibre Channel disks. PMC-Sierra's SXP 36x6G normally is used if SAS drives are employed and its PM8307 can be used to provide dual-port SAS access to SATA drives. The Tachyon QE4 comes in a 544-pin flip-chip plastic ball-grid array (FC PBGA) package. It costs $225 in prototype quantities. www.pmc-sierra.com

See Associated Figure

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.