Austin, Texas - October 24, 2000 - Banderacom, Inc., an InfiniBand™ semiconductor start-up company, today announced a partnership with Wind River Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:WIND), a leading provider of software and services for smart devices in the Internet age, to develop and supply InfiniBand transport software that will include support for Banderacom's IBandit architecture.

InfiniBand technology is a high-performance channel-based architecture, which provides increased scalability and reliability for servers and other Internet infrastructure equipment. Using a packet-based switching fabric, InfiniBand technology is expected to meet the need for faster, less congested, and more reliable transport of data in the Internet.

Banderacom and Wind River Systems will be developing InfiniBand transport software for Wind River Systems' market-leading VxWorks® and IxWorks® real-time operating systems. InfiniBand transport software performs the "transport services" layer as defined by the InfiniBand Trade Association specification. This software controls the semiconductor chipsets within InfiniBand channel adaptor devices. The "transport services" hides the details of communicating over InfiniBand from the application software, which reduces the work that equipment manufacturers need to do in order to develop application software for their InfiniBand-based products. The availability of "off-the-shelf" transport software will greatly simplify and accelerate InfiniBand system design.

"While Wind River System' VxWorks and IxWorks operating systems have gained a strong foot hold in the current generation of server appliances and storage devices, much of the market is still based on proprietary in-house technologies," said David Fraser, vice president and general manager of Wind River Systems' Networks business unit. "We see InfiniBand as a critical enabler to the next generation of these products, and we intend to be the leading software supplier for InfiniBand-powered devices. Our partnership with Banderacom in this area is an important part of our strategy."

"A survey of our customers indicated that Wind River Systems already supplies the most popular embedded software and development tools for InfiniBand equipment in development or planned," said Eric Johnson, president and CEO of Banderacom. "With the addition of this transport software, our IBandit InfiniBand customers now get one stop shopping for their complete InfiniBand software needs from Wind River Systems."

"The early availability of the Banderacom IBandit architecture combined with support from market leader Wind River Systems is a win-win for the industry," said Vernon Turner, vice president, Global Enterprise Server Solutions at IDC. "This should indeed jump-start the InfiniBand market."

IBandit's advanced architecture and long list of standard and unique features enable the broadest possible variety of applications. IBandit's single chip solution enables high density, high performance, low-power systems by providing the industry's most integrated InfiniBand system-on-chip device.

InfiniBand is an industry standards based interconnect technology that dramatically increases scalability, reliability, and flexibility of server and storage systems used in modern networks. Whereas today's storage and server networks require a multitude of different interconnect technologies including Gigabit Ethernet, Fiber Channel, SCSI, and PCI interconnect, ultimately InfiniBand can replace any or all of these within data centers providing a universal interconnect fabric enabling new, lower cost, higher performance, and more reliable networks that are not possible today.

The InfiniBand Trade Association is an industry trade organization dedicated to developing and promoting the InfiniBand architecture. More information about the InfiniBand Trade Association and specifications can be found at www.infinibandta.org.

About Banderacom

Banderacom is a privately held, fabless semiconductor company located in Austin, Texas. Banderacom is focused on dramatically increasing the scalability, reliability, flexibility, and time-to-market of networking, storage, and server system manufacturer's products by providing flexible, interoperable, high performance InfiniBand semiconductors. Banderacom was founded by a veteran team from the microprocessor and communications semiconductor industries in 1999, and has received funding from Austin Ventures, Crossroads Systems, Intel Corporation, and Jato Tech Ventures. Banderacom is a member of InfiniBand Trade Association.

Return to top