PLX announced its NAS 7800  system-on-a-chip (SoC) family, the industry’s highest-performance, next generation of consumer-friendly network attached storage (NAS) solutions.

The new PLX® NAS 7800 family tackles two separate challenges in today’s market.  First, two of the SoCs -- the NAS 7820 and NAS 7821 -- bring to market the highest-performance solutions at the absolute lowest cost, making NAS more attractive in the home as a central, powerful storage platform.  Second, the top-end NAS 7825 version enables higher levels of integration and functionality, thus supporting new markets for NAS, including routers/gateways, DVRs, and set-top boxes, each of which take advantage of PLX’s unique hardware and software platform.

The NAS 7800 family is PLX’s third generation of consumer NAS SoC solutions.  PLX successfully doubled overall performance of the previous generation by implementing its highly optimized Trident architecture, which combines a dual-core ARM 11 multiprocessor with multiple NAS application specific-hardware engines and software acceleration modules.  The Trident architecture provides exceptional multi-client NAS performance, while simultaneously running multiple software applications.  Some of the optimized acceleration functions include encryption, hashing, RAID, audio, VoIP and routing.

The NAS 7800 family’s unmatched price-performance ratio is driven by its high level of integration, requiring very few additional components to build a system.  No non-volatile memory is required on the board as the device can boot from the disk drive.  The NAS 7800 system runs on highly optimized Linux-based software to maximize NAS transfers and leave a large percentage of the system resources for applications.

The PLX NAS 7800 family can centralize storage and manage the high-speed streaming of multiple digital mediums, such as high-definition video, high-resolution photos, audio and other digital content, thus simultaneously connecting multiple users and electronic devices within and beyond the home.  Additionally, PLX developed new applications that integrate NAS into set-top boxes, DVRs, routers/gateways and other networked consumer electronics including the connectivity of multiple computers (desktops, laptops and netbooks), smart phones, digital photo frames, Internet radio and other various mediums.

General sampling and Rapid Development Kits (RDKs) are available in Q1’10, followed by full production in Q2’10.