Gbit Ethernet Switching ICs Deliver Full Wire Speed Forwarding

The MVTX2800 family of eight-port, 1 Gbps non-blocking Ethernet switch chips with on-chip address memory employ a centralized shared-memory architecture. This scheme is said to allow for a very-high-performance packet-forwarding rate of 11.904 Mpackets/s at full wire speed. A single chip has a maximum of eight 1 Gb/s ports and a CPU interface with a 16/8-bit bus. The chips support up to 64-K MAC addresses to aggregate traffic from multiple wiring closet stacks. The ports can also support 100/10 Mb/s data rates. Other features include hot plug detection, a maximum non-blocking throughput of 8 Gb/s, port-based and ID-tagged VLAN (IEEE802.1Q) up to 4K VLAN, and support for IP multicast with IGMP snooping up to 64K groups. The MVTX2804 managed and MVTX2803 unmanaged ICs are priced at $120 each/10,000. A design kit with software, schematics, and layout is available for $8,000. Zarlink Semiconductor, Ontario, Canada. (613) 592 0200.