Marvell

Discovery VI is the latest advanced member of Marvell's system controller family optimized for a broad range of applications from sophisticated routers, switches and wireless base stations to high-volume storage and laser printer applications. On the leading-edge of system controller technology, the Discovery VI's innovative feature-set has received broad support from the industry's leading PowerPC processor vendors—Freescale Semiconductor and IBM.

Industry Leading Architecture

The industry's most powerful architecture for PowerPC systems, Discovery VI sets high benchmarks for performance and integration thanks to its innovative cross-bar architecture, advanced communications peripherals and performance tuned interfaces. Discovery VI is the industry's first system controller to integrate a DDR2 interface, PCI-Express, and USB on a single chip. The on-chip cross-bar fabric with any-to-any connectivity enables concurrent transactions among multiple units resulting in very high system throughput, and allows system designers to create high-performance scalable systems.

Discovery VI also supports split transactions with out-of-order completion. To guarantee minimum CPU-to-DRAM latency, Discovery VI implements a dedicated point-to-point, full duplex data path between the CPU interface and DRAM controller. The high-performance input and output (I/O) capabilities of the Discovery VI device include PCI/PCI-X, PCI-E, GbE MAC, USB, dual UARTs and SATA to support a wide range of applications. Clock generation features were integrated into Discovery VI for optimized system performance. The PCI-X interfaces can be used to connect to network adapters, storage adapters or custom ASICs. Its multiple GbE ports are ideal for redundant backplane connectivity and remote management.

The Discovery VI PowerPC system controller comes with a complete set of hardware and software development tools to assist design engineers with product development. Marvell's worldwide field applications engineers collaborate closely with customers to develop and deliver new competitive products to market on time.