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January 2007 - Concurrent Technologies announces
their new VXS packet switched serial fabric board, the FX 210/018, to operate
alongside their range of VMEbus VXS packet switched single board
computers. The FX 210/018 is an
"unmanaged" embedded 1000Mbps baseband IEEE 802.3 switching platform,
conforming to VITA 41.3, providing a low cost, low power, packet switching
solution for voice/data communications. Typically consuming less than 16 Watts it supports eighteen payload
boards, an inter-switch link and up to four Ethernet ports on the front
panel. The switch core contains a
wire-speed, Layer 2, Quality of Service (QoS) switch fabric. The
FX 210/018 supports VITA 38 system management, user configuration port and hot
insertion/removal to the backplane. Extended temperature variants are also available,
including –40°C to +85°C. Typical applications include networking equipment,
VoIP telephony systems, data management and multiple blade servers.
Utilizing the Marvell® Prestera®
98DX240 single chip serial switch device, the FX 210/018 sustains full duplex
full wire speeds on all twenty-four ports. Ports 1 to 18 are used for connection to the VXS payload boards. Port 19
and port 20 form a x2 SerDes inter-switch link to connect to a second FX
210/018 board for switch redundancy or load balancing. And, optionally on the front panel, ports 21
to 24 are via four Gigabit Ethernet interfaces or ports 21 to 22 are via two
1000Base-SX multimode optical fiber interfaces. The switch device "learns" and caches up to 8192 MAC addresses
in its forwarding database. The switch
can handle time-critical/multimedia traffic such as voice, video and data as it
utilizes four hardware priority queues (fixed or fair-weighted) per port and
supports a range of QoS traffic classifications: port ID, IEEE 802.1p and
IPv6. The board’s health and status can
also be monitored via an IPMB0 interface to an on-board microcontroller,
providing system management support compatible with VITA 38
For applications that
require an embedded serial switch in an industry standard VXS chassis, the FX
210/018 provides a reliable low power switch. The payload boards govern the operating system requirements.
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VXS VITA 41.3 Technical Notes
The VXS base standard defines physical features that enable
high-speed serial interconnects in a VME64x compatible
system. These features include a high speed VXS P0/J0
connector on a VME64x payload board (e.g. VX 407/04x), a VXS
backplane/chassis infrastructure and up to two switched
serial fabric boards. The ratio of one VXS P0/J0 connector
per payload board to many on a central network switch board
lends itself to a star network topology; where each payload
board is connected to a port on the FX 210/018. For higher
reliability and/or load balancing, two
FX 210/018 boards can interconnect on the same VXS backplane
communicating via a x2 SerDes inter-switch link.
The VITA 41.3 standard defines an implementation of IEEE
Standard 802.3 within the VXS framework that provides
1000Mbps full-duplex data transfer over two differential
pairs using 8B/10B encoding and baseband signaling. This
implementation is based on 1000BaseCX as defined in IEEE
Standard 802.3- 2002, Clause 39 and is referred to as
1000Mbps baseband IEEE 802.3 signaling. VITA 41.3 is useful
for both data and control planes in medium-performance
applications that follow a packet-based communications model
– system determinism is improved as no data transfer on a
specific payload link will be interrupted by a higher
priority transfer or have to wait for a bus transaction to
complete before acquiring the communications hardware. VITA
41.3 is attractive because of the wide range of readily
available low-cost hardware and software that has been
developed using the IEEE 802.3 standard. |
