---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some SPARC Stories From Press Announcements SunFLASH Vol 16 #18 April 1990 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- SUN OPENS SBUS DESIGN CENTER FOR THIRD-PARTY DEVELOPERS MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. --April 25, 1990-- Sun Microsystems today announced the opening of its first SBus Design Center to provide free technical assistance, improve product quality and lower investment costs for developers of SBus products. The new design center will be located at Sun's headquarters in Mountain View and will open in May 1990. SBus is a low-cost, high-performance modular I/O interconnect designed by Sun and made available to the industry with no licensing restrictions, design fees or royalties. Sun's SBus technical support services, including the new design center, continue to help SBus developers reduce their time to market significantly. For example, the center will offer developers use of the latest board design and verification tools for designing SBus products. This new center overcomes an issue common with other buses by providing an environment for the SBus developer community to test the interoperabilty of SBus products. This enables all SBus products to work in any SBus system. The opening of the SBus Design Center is one of Sun's many programs that supports the SBus developer community. In January of this year, Sun launched its SBus Technical Support Group and in February began its SBus technical seminars, held worldwide throughout 1990. Together, these programs are representative of the most recent ways Sun is fueling the popularity of this truly open system bus. Currently, there are more than 35 SBus card and system vendors developing more than 60 SBus products and services. SBus was first introduced as part of Sun's SPARCstation(TM) 1 desktop workstation and will continue to be Sun's standard modular I/O interconnect. SBus is optimized for CMOS and surface mount technologies and makes use of postcard-sized add-in boards. The SBus peak bandwidth can accommodate data transfers of up to 100 Mbytes/sec. Andy Goodrich, director of workstation products for RasterOps, said, "Developing our products on the SBus lets us enter fast-growing markets for products such as Sun's popular SPARCstation 1. There's an installed base of more than 120,000 SBus slots today, so we see an excellent business opportunity. Thanks to Sun's SBus technical support program, we were able to ship our 24-bit true color frame buffer just 68 days after we started work on the project. There is no other system supplier with this level of development assistance and openness for an I/O bus." Developers utilizing the SBus Design Center will be able to use various CAD tools from leading EDA and semiconductor vendors, including Cadence Design Systems, LSI Logic, Minc, Valid Logic Systems, Viewlogic Systems and Xilinx. Several Sun systems as well as test equipment will be housed at the design center, along with simulation models from Sun that can be used with a designer's own SBus design models. The SBus Technical Support Group is staffed by Sun's SBus application engineers and provides hands-on development assistance. In addition, the SBus Technical Support Group offers SBus technical seminars worldwide. The seminar schedule includes: Boston (April 18), Chicago (May 9), Atlanta (June 12), Mountain View (August 15), and Boston (October 16-18 at Buscon East). European and Far Eastern seminars are also planned for this summer and fall. These support services are available at no cost to any developer purchasing the SBus Developer's Kit. Developer support is provided via telephone hotline at (415) 336-3558, via electronic mail at sbustech@sun.com; and via facsimile at (415) 962-0148. The SBus Developer's Kit includes documentation and guidelines to facilitate SBus card development. The SBus Developer's Kit is priced at $300 (U.S. list) and is available now. For more information about the SBus Design Center, contact: Yatin Trivedi at (415) 336-1812; and about the SBus Technical Support Group and seminars contact: Chris Wellens at (415) 336-9131. Sun Microsystems, Inc., headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., is a leading worldwide supplier of network-based distributed computing systems, including professional workstations, servers and UNIX(R) operating system and productivity software. ### SPARC and SPARCstation are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T. All other products or services mentioned in this document are identified by the trademarks or service marks of their respective companies or organizations. For reader inquiries, telephone 1-800-821-4643 outside California. Inside California, 1-800-821-4642. Press Contact: Leiann Lee (415) 336-0597 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Sunflash is an electronic mail news service from Sun Microsystems, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Please address comments to John McLaughlin (sun!sunvice!johnj or johnj@sunvice.East.Sun.COM). (305) 776-7770.