Applied Micro Circuits Corporation and Silicon Image, Inc. announced a working alliance to provide Network Attached Storage (NAS) reference designs based on AMCC Power Architecture based processors and Silicon Image's SATA controllers and port multipliers. AMCC and Silicon Image will provide the building blocks to deliver network storage solutions including AMCC's 405EX, 440SPe and the recently announced 460SX and Silicon Image's Sil 3132 and Sil3726.

AMCC provides a broad range of processors based on the Power Architecture, allowing system designers to implement compatible NAS products that scale from home to enterprise-class solutions. One example is the PowerPC 405EX, that combines the proven performance of the market leading PowerPC 405 processor core with a high performance suite of peripherals and interfaces. The PowerPC 405EX is ideal for applications such as SOHO and consumer NAS systems that require exceptional performance, small foot print, and low power. Another example is the PowerPC 460EX processor. With speeds of up to 1.0GHz as well as a robust peripheral set, the PowerPC 460EX is ideally suited to a wide range of SMB-class NAS applications. For high-performance enterprise-class solutions, the 440SPe and 460SX Storage processors provide best-in-class system performance, high-bandwidth I/O subsystems, and high throughput hardware accelerated RAID 5 and RAID 6 functionality.

"We are pleased to announce our strategic alliance with Silicon Image," said Charlie Ashton, Director of Enablement at AMCC. "The products from our two companies are highly synergistic and complementary, so we are confident that our NAS customers will benefit from the results of this close cooperation, such as optimized reference designs."

AMCC and Silicon Image are working together to define and showcase reference designs optimized for specific NAS applications. Customers will be able to use these proven, baseline designs with high confidence that their end products will be optimized for the applicable market segments.

"We are delighted to be working with AMCC to provide advanced solutions for the rapidly growing NAS market place," said Alex Chervet, director of marketing at Silicon Image. "The combination of Silicon Image's enterprise class port multipliers & controllers and AMCC's market-leading processors provide our mutual customers a quick way to bring proven ultra-high performance designs to market."

Building on a proven architecture, Silicon Image's semiconductors and intellectual property provide the flexibility in system design that allows customers to architect industry-leading solutions for the home to enterprise NAS markets. Silicon Image's SiI 3132 is a single-chip, one-lane PCI Express to 2-port Serial ATA (SATA) II host controller that provides server-class performance. The SiI3132 product supports all Serial ATA II features, including FIS based switching and out of order NCQ data delivery. Silicon Image's SiI3726 is a 1-to-5 Serial ATA (SATA) Port Multiplier designed to provide a high-performance link between a single SATA host port and five SATA device ports. The SiI3726 product gives system designers or end users the flexibility to choose 1.5 Gbps or 3 Gbps SATA hard drives.