Texas Instruments Inc and Force Computers Inc have teamed up for joint development of a chip that implements the parallel protocol control cache coherency functions for the Futurebus+ standard for high-speed processor buses. The PPC, Parallel Protocol Controller, will bring multi-processing support to the Futurebus+, enabling parallel-processing, transaction-processing, multi-processing and fault-tolerant system designers to take full advantage of the new bus technology. Texas will fabricate the chips, which will be implemented in Force FCPU-4X Motorola 68040-based boards. The PPC also becomes part of Texas’ TFB2000 Futurebus+ chip family as the TFB2002 and Texas will market it to other Futurebus+ board and system manufacturers. The PPC will also be fabricated by Philips Components-Signetics following its agreement with Texas in October. Prototypes are expected by the end of next year with board-level production slated for 1992. The part is not restricted to use with the Motorola chip set, and can interface with all kinds of processors. Force will begin supplying basic Futurebus+ boards to the US Navy – one of the prime movers of the Futurebus+ effort – in the third quarter of next year, where much of the testing will be carried out. Futurebus+ development has been held back by the lack and high cost of components, plus the absence of a hard and fast set of standards to work to. However Texas and Force say that the IEEE P896.1 Futurebus+ definition is now complete, and by 1995 Texas expects Futurebus+ chip sets to be competing favourably with other bus architectures with a 32-bit implementation for low-end personal computers and workstations costing around $125, and a 64-bit set, with a data transfer rate of 3.2Gb per second for high-end graphics workstations priced at around $175. Force’s 68040-based VME board, the CPU-4X, ships from January next year and will be upgradable to the Futurebus+ version: it says that alliances with systems manufacturers for Futurebus+ are already in place, but it declined to name those companies involved.
