AppliedMicro Showcased Wireless NAS

Applied Micro Circuits Corporation announced a production-ready solution integrating network storage and 802.11ac WiFi wireless access into a single platform to provide a digital media experience for the connected home.

This all-in-one storage-WiFi solution enables consumers to store, share and stream digital content to any connected device throughout the home network. It’s powered by the APM86491 Catalina SoC, ant embedded processor designed to handle the bandwidth requirements of this new class of consumer electronic systems.

The company was demonstrating the integrated storage-WiFi solution from June 5-9 at Computex Taipei 2012.

The Catalina platform enables this next-generation solution with scalable, enterprise performance and low-power at affordable price points.

The integrated USB 3.0 on Catalina helps the converged solution deliver NAS read/write performance at 100MBps, a 2-3x improvement over USB 2.0 offerings. Files as large as 4GB, such as a feature-length high-definition movie, can now be downloaded and shared in less than ten seconds.

The converged platform delivers a richer home media experience because Catalina integrates several application-aware accelerators in hardware, such as an enterprise QoS engine for intelligent traffic proritization, TCP offload engines for both transmit and receive and a fast packet classification engine with support for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). Additionally, the SLIMprocompany co-processor on board Catalina enables low-power operation to meet energy efficiency.

AppliedMicro is meeting the performance needs of demanding digital consumers as the number of connected devices supported by home networks continues to skyrocket and as the volume of digital content created and stored by these devices increases. Its converged storage-WiFi solution provides OEM and ODM with a platform to accelerate time-to-market with performance at price points that will satisfy family budgets.

"Our converged platform is designed to offload some of the ancillary system tasks from the main CPU core, so that the primary mission of provisioning wireless bandwidth and ensuring read-and-write storage performance is given the highest priority," said Pravin Bathija, product marketing manager of the Compute Business Unit of AppliedMicro. "The net result is a richer media experience for end-users even as the number of connected devices grows and as the volume of content expands."