A US startup company has developed a system which expands the speed of PCI on networks and high end and networking systems by a factor of 30 over existing 32-bit bus technology. But although the company has developed a much faster PCI system, there seems to be little connection between its technology and the proposed PCI-X extensions suggested by Compaq, IBM and HP last year. Sebring, whose Web site is here, has developed a ring system which uses a dual counter rotating architecture, employing differential signalling. The Sebring Ring resembles the scalable coherent interface (SCI), with nodes using dual 512 byte FIFO buffers acting as on and off ramps to the network. The company completed a $5.5 million round of VC funding in the middle of last year and will sell integrated chips to OEMs which, it claims, build on the standard PCI bus while offering the increased speed factor. ®