Mai Logic's "Ready for IBM Technology"-certified Articia family system controllers and Teron series evaluation systems are developed to propel the IBM 750CXe, 750FX, and 750GX PowerPC® microprocessor family into the broader global marketplace for embedded industrial controls, military, multimedia, consumer electronic appliances, blade servers, thin client systems, storage, networking, and communication applications. With leading-edge CPU bus speed capabilities and enhanced AGP, PCI-X, SDRAM and DDR support, the combination of the Articia chipset and IBM PowerPC 750 series processors offers a most desirable solution to the performance-intensive applications marketplace.

Articia family system controllers

Articia S
Articia S is the first ready-to-market chipset of the Articia family chipsets. It supports all PowerPC 750 family processors at a 133-MHz CPU bus speed and standard SDRAM and dual AGP2X/PCI buses. The first commercially available chipset supporting AGP bus for PowerPC processors, it is ideally suited for compute-intensive graphics and multimedia applications.

Articia Sa
Articia Sa integrates interrupt controller, timer, 4-channel direct memory access (DMA) controller, clock generator, impedance control I/O and programmable current-driving DRAM buffers. It features 64-/32-bit PCI-X v.1.0 on bus 0 and AGP4X/PCI-X/PCI on bus 1 as well as low pin count (LPC) for adoption of super I/O chips. Armed with its patented iMemory, Genetic Computing and Triple DES support, it offers system reliability and security for mission-critical applications and communications systems.

Articia P
Articia P uses the same core as Articia Sa and expands on its features and capabilities to create one of the first PowerPC chipsets enabling five buses to run concurrently in one single package. The five buses are 166-MHz CPU bus, SDRAM bus and three peripheral buses, which are the combination of 64-bit PCI-X, AGP4X, and 32-bit PCI buses (see Figure 1). This will enable superior system performance in PowerPC 750FX and 750GX designs. The Articia P capabilities expand into the higher end of military, industrial, multimedia, and storage and blade server applications.

See Table 1 for an overview of the Articia family of chipsets.

Figure 1. Articia P block diagram.

Teron series evaluation systems
The Teron board currently has the following features:

• Support of 133-MHz processor bus speed
• Articia S chipset
• Floating Buffer for smart data traffic management
• Two 168-pin DIMM slots on board
• Support for registered or nonbuffered SDRAM DIMM module
• Three 33-MHz 32-bit PCI slots on Bus 0
• One 66-MHz AGP slot compliant with AGP Specification V2.0 and one 66-/33-MHz PCI slot on Bus 1
• Complete I/O devices include Ethernet, USB, ATA 133/100 and onboard audio
• Availability now at $3,900 for the first board, $2,340 for each additional board thereafter

The IBM PowerPC 750 processor family and the Articia chipset family, together with the Teron evaluation kit, are designed to provide the customer a competitive edge by enabling faster time to market and revenue, exceptional familiarity and flexibility to enable painless turnkey development for a great variety of commercial, industrial or military applications, and the bottom line — a lower cost of ownership. In order to serve the traditional PowerPC processor markets and to generate new ones, in addition to the Articia family of system controller chipset, Mai Logic has lined up a number of innovative solutions as the result of collaboration with its strategic partners, including Topshine Electronics Corp. and ATIO System, Inc., a subsidiary of First International Computer (FIC) Group. The innovative array of Mai Logic’s systems-level application offerings — among which the most noteworthy are the PowerPC 750FX-based video streaming and network computing solutions — have generated considerable interest in Europe and Asia. The Teron systems are available through global channels in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific/Japan.

Figure 2. Teron PX evaluation system and PowerPC 750FX CPU module card.

Teron PX
The Teron PX evaluation system features a 300-pin low-profile MegArray connector (see Figure 2). Through the MegArray connector, Teron PX can be easily configured to different development platforms powered by single PowerPC 750CXe, 750FX or 750GX processors. It can also support dual PowerPC microprocessor module cards. Teron PX is populated with the Articia S chipset. Follow-on Teron evaluation systems will be available soon after the Articia Sa, and Articia P chipsets become available in the second half of 2003.

The Teron boards are designed and are available to PowerPC processor-based system designers and integrators to use as:

• Evaluation tools before making their technology selection decisions
• Software development platforms while designing their specific final product
• Reference designs in developing their own products
• Production-level solutions in volume for turnkey integration into their own systems

These serve the purpose of a quick entry to the market with a reliable PowerPC processor-based product at minimal development costs.

Mai Logic has engineered its general-purpose, high-performance Articia family with an unprecedented and innovative "bus-centric" control pipeline chipset methodology, which provides a more-balanced architecture serving both the CPU and peripheral bus requirements. The system-level integration of the Articia controllers with the feature-rich IBM PowerPC microprocessors provides a very low-cost platform to system developers while it raises the performance bar. The Articia chips, together with the Teron evaluation systems, provide highly compelling end-to-end system design solutions for rapid market penetration. These are key differentiators of the Articia family and this is why it offers a natural choice for customers when it comes to choosing a system controller.