Agilent Technologies Moves Industry's First 2 Gigabit-per-second Fibre Channel Controllers Into Production; Proven Tachyon IC Design Delivers Industry-Leading Performance for SANs - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, June 5, 2000

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE:A) Wednesday announced that the industry's first highly integrated, single-chip 2 gigabit-per-second (Gb/s) Fibre Channel controllers are now in production.

Prototypes of the 2-Gb/s Tachyon devices have been being supplied to major developers of storage subsystems, storage routers, host bus adapters and host computer motherboards since November, and the ICs are now available in production quantities. These controller ICs will be used in SAN applications such as Internet and Intranet access, digitized video, online transactional processing and other enterprise storage applications.

"By delivering the industry's first 2-Gb/s Fibre Channel embedded controllers, Agilent is playing a leading role to increase SAN performance," said Bob Whitson, marketing manager for Agilent Technologies' SAN Products Group. "Over twenty industry-leading OEMs have incorporated the XL2 controllers in their next-generation designs, and we expect to see these new 2-Gb/s Fibre Channel products on the market during the summer."

The Agilent HPFC-5200 is the only single-chip PCI Fibre Channel controller available. It features the proven Tachyon hardware state machine architecture that provides high levels of performance without external SRAM. The architecture uses hardware automation -- a fast method of managing I/O operations -- to execute the Fibre Channel protocol and SCSI command operations. Unlike other RISC-based Fibre Channel architectures, the Tachyon architecture permits performance to scale proportionally to the available system CPU resources, avoiding performance bottlenecks associated with on-chip processors.

In addition, the entire Tachyon family features an open architecture -- in both hardware and firmware -- that is more user-friendly and versatile than typical RISC-based solutions. The Tachyon Software Development Kit (TSDK), which features fully-commented C source code, is available at no charge to developers seeking quick time to market for their 2-Gb products.

Tachyon XL2-based Host Adapters

The Tachyon controller ICs are integral components in Agilent's 2-Gb/s HHBA-5220/21 PCI-to-Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs). The HBAs are designed for PC server and workstation platforms running data-intensive, high-bandwidth applications. Both adapters are Microsoft Cluster Server (Wolfpack) certifiable.

Availability

Production quantities of the HPFC-5200 are available now to qualified OEM customers. For more information, users can visit www.semiconductor.agilent.com (click on Storage Area Networking).

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) is a diversified technology company, resulting from Hewlett-Packard Company's plan to strategically realign itself into two fully independent companies. With approximately 43,000 employees serving customers in more than 120 countries, Agilent Technologies is a global leader in designing and manufacturing test, measurement and monitoring instruments, systems and solutions, and semiconductor and optical components. The company serves markets that include communications, electronics, life sciences and healthcare. In fiscal year 1999, the businesses comprising Agilent, then a subsidiary of HP, had net revenue of more than $8.3 billion.

Information about Agilent Technologies can be found on the Web at www.agilent.com.