Taiwan BIOS AP Designs Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGAs Into RAID Motherboard

Xilinx, Inc. announced that BIOS AP Taiwan, an alliance partner of RAID controller and system company BIOS Corp. Japan, has designed Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGAs its ROMB miniITX ATOM motherboard for surveillance server and NAS system applications.

The FPGAs are being embedded into a RAID motherboard to enable system integrators to build reliable server appliances, such as surveillance video recorders and NAS. This ROMB appliance supports high sustained throughput and reliable data storage for new digital surveillance video recorders. Spartan-6 FPGAs have enabled designers to simplify the design of hardware and reduce production costs. Additionally, the flexibility of Spartan-6 FPGAs provide a programmable configuration and compact design for the RAID technology that can be adapted to incorporate new features without changing the hardware.   

"Our partnering company, BIOS Corp. Japan, has a long history of success working with Xilinx for over 10 years now, so it made sense to continue the accomplished relationship," said Dennis Lin, President of BIOS AP. "The Xilinx FPGAs played a key role as we introduce the first single chip RAID 6 ATOM motherboard in the world with dual Gigabit Ethernet and six hard drive interface which will be available in March 2012. We are looking forward to the next generation of Xilinx FPGAs, including the integration of CPU cores. We believe an all-in-one solution will deliver better cost performance in the future."

With Spartan-6 FPGAs, BIOS AP has been able to deliver performance RAID in a constrained space on the motherboard. By completely offloading RAID operation from CPUs, the cost effective ROMB can deliver comparable performance to some of the costly, high-end server boards on the market.

About Xilinx 6 series FPGAs
Since their introduction in February 2009, Xilinx’s 6 series FPGAs, Spartan-6 and Virtex-6, have been adopted by customers worldwide in a range of applications and key end markets including: aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer, industrial, medical, scientific and wired/wireless communications. To date, Xilinx has sold more than 10,000 Targeted Design Platforms for the 6 series. More than 30, 6 series Targeted Design Platforms and 70 FMC daughter cards are available in production from Xilinx and members of its ecosystem (Distribution Channel and Xilinx Alliance Program).

The Virtex-6 family is the silicon foundation for Xilinx Targeted Design Platforms, built with the mix of programmability, integrated blocks for digital signal processing, memory, and connectivity support – including high-speed transceiver capabilities – to satisfy the demand for higher bandwidth and higher performance. Spartan-6 FPGAs are designed for cost-sensitive applications requiring high-speed connectivity and low-power operation with serial transceivers, advanced power management, and proven 45nm architecture.