Manufactured by Athernos Communications, the AR8216 six-port, 10/100 Ethernet switch is well-suited to a wide array of wired and wireless networking applications, as well as mainstream IEEE 802.11n and 802.11g wireless router and gateway platforms. The switch offers developers the flexibility of five 10/100 Ethernet PHY ports, one MII port for CPU connectivity, and six independent media access controllers (MACs). The device comes in an 80-pin low-profile quad flat package (LQFP) that is one-third the size of competing solutions.
To provide non-blocking switching performance in all traffic environments, the AR8216 supports an advanced QoS architecture. The architecture prioritizes switch traffic for different classes of applications, such as voice traffic for IP phones, video traffic for multimedia, and data traffic for e-mail. In order to meet stringent service-provider requirements, the switch supports ingress policing and egress rate limiting, as well as IPv4 IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) and IPv6 MLD (Multicast Listener Discovery) snooping. This significantly improves the performance of streaming media and other bandwidth-intensive IP multicast applications. In addition, the device supports virtual LANs for separation of different users or groups on the network. The AR8216 is currently sampling to key customers. Visit www.atheros.com/pt/ethernet_index.htm.