Gigabit Ethernet Switch Chip Puts 16 Ports Into Action

Designed for use in Layer 2, 3 and 4 Gigabit Ethernet switches and claiming to be an industry first, the CXE-16 Gigabit Ethernet IC supports with its 16 on-chip ports a throughput of 24 million packets/s. This high-port-density chip offers wire-speed QoS, including classification, prioritization and guaranteed bandwidth, and numbers standalone switches, routers and backplanes among the products it’s well-suited for.
Other features of the Gigabit Ethernet device include 802.3ad link aggregation, port mirroring, 802.1Q VLANs, spanning tree, broadcast storm control, 802.3x flow control, and more. In addition to MACs, CAMs, buffers and a switching engine, CXE-16 also boasts of a powerful shared memory architecture. In sharing memory across a CXE-based system, the chip is said to use resources efficiently and achieve true output queuing with no head-of-line blocking. The on-chip buffering enables non-blocked switching of the packets without expanding to off-chip overflow buffering. The chip supports external overflow buffering via a glueless interface to Rambus memory. And it also creates a security barrier without sacrificing network throughput.
CXE-16 chip in 836-pin EBGAs costs $950 each/1000, with production to start in Q4. Reference designs are available. The firm is also introducing the CXE-1000, a 4-port Gigabit and 24-port Fast Ethernet L2/L3/L4 switch/router chip and the CXE-5000, a Content Addressable Memory (CAM) chip.