Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing has introduced the PGR8, an unmanaged, 8-port Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) Switch PMC card. The company says that its conduction-cooled, rugged mezzanine module enables system designers quickly and easily to add GigE switched networks to their most demanding VMEbus and CompactPCI-based embedded applications.
Lynn Patterson, a VP of the company explains, “Defence and aerospace platforms deployed in harsh environments increasingly need dependable high bandwidth data communications. The PGR8 allows gigabit switched networks to be built into existing embedded systems.”
Compliant with the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard, the PGR8 provides integrated 8-port Layer-2 switching and delivers full wire-speed over each ports. The card supports up to 8K unicast MAC addresses.
Network management features on the PGR8 include a 4096-entry ARL MAC address table with automatic learning, port trunking and aggregation, as well as advanced flow-control and head-of-line blocking prevention.
An optional mirroring mode enables one port to monitor all the other ports. Mirror mode prevents packet loss when the monitor port is busy or experiences very high levels of traffic by employing back pressure or flow control to instruct the switch’s other ports to slow down.
Another management option is broadcast storm filtering, which monitors and, if necessary, constrains the level of broadcast traffic on each port when a high level of multi-casting and/or broadcast traffic is detected. Each of the card’s ports has its own dedicated link/speed/activity LED.