WuXi Stars Micro System Technologies has introduced three interconnect chips aimed at AI servers and clusters. The company, founded in 2020, held its first brand and full-stack product launch in Wuxi on October 15, showing 12 interconnect chips already in mass production alongside the new parts.
The centerpiece is the C82-4G, which the company calls the first PCIe 6.0 switch developed in China. It supports up to 144 lanes at 64 GT/s per lane, double the per-lane rate of PCIe 5.0, using PAM4 signaling and FLIT mode. The company quotes non-blocking switching with latency in the 100-nanosecond range, and support for fabric networking plus CXL memory expansion and pooling. It is designed for internal connections inside next-generation AI servers, where switches extend a CPU's PCIe lanes to GPUs, network cards and SSDs.
The second product is an 800G multi-protocol AI network interface card, which the company describes as the first of its kind from a Chinese supplier. It integrates a 48-lane PCIe Gen6 switch, supports 800G line-rate forwarding with microsecond-level latency, offloads RoCE v2 and offers programmable congestion control. The company says it is tuned for Hygon CPUs and next-generation supernode architectures, targeting node-to-node links in clusters of tens of thousands of accelerators.
The third is a multi-mode RAID chip built with domestic IP. It supports SAS, SATA and PCIe 5.0 connections, works with both hard drives and SSDs, includes a hardware encryption engine, and is said to raise bandwidth and IOPS by about eight times over the previous generation.
General manager Guo Erhui argued that computing power is a system of tightly coupled compute, networking, storage, power, cooling and scheduling, and that interconnect becomes the bottleneck as clusters grow to tens of thousands of cards. The company said its products are already deployed in internet, finance, telecom and energy settings, with reported return rates below 100 DPPM for chips and below 500 DPPM for boards.
At the launch, Kylin Software, UnionTech, Tencent Cloud, Inspur, H3C, ZTE and Lenovo signed cooperation agreements covering adaptation of its interconnect chips to their operating systems and server platforms. The company says its next steps are volume production of the next-generation NIC and the PCIe 6.0 switch, along with work on optical interconnect and storage pooling.
All specifications are company claims and have not been independently verified.
SEE ALSO: China's AI Infrastructure Race Has Moved to Supernodes · Tsingway and BAAI Open-Source Open3D-PIMC