Communications: Carrier-Class Ethernet Switch Chip Supports 36 Million Packets/s

Feb. 16, 2006

The G8000 family of Ethernet switch chips claims the industry's highest level of integration for carrier Ethernet services. The three chips in the Packetry II family support wirespeed rates of up to 36 million packets/s for packet processing and traffic management. The G8024 integrates 24 1-Gbit Ethernet ports, while the G8116 sports 16 1-Gbit ports and one 10-Gbit port. Lastly, the G8300 has three 10-Gbit ports and supports standard XAUI interfaces. All the chips also have a dozen 3.125-Gbit/s serializer-deserializer fabric interfaces for non-blocking scaling when implementing larger systems. The chips handle-large and scalable tables for Layer 2, IPv4, IPv6, ACL, and MPLS. They also provide deep and scalable buffering to prevent packet loss and ensure quality of service. The G135 intelligent multiplexer integrates a dozen Gigabit media access controllers. It supports advanced multi-tuple classification policing and class-based queuing to guarantee bandwidth for high-priority traffic. Samples of all of the devices are immediately available. Prices start at about $450 each for the G8024 in quantities of 1000 units.

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Greenfield Networks Inc.
www.greenfieldnetworks.com

About the Author

Dave Bursky

Technologist

Dave Bursky, the founder of New Ideas in Communications, a publication website featuring the blog column Chipnastics – the Art and Science of Chip Design. He is also president of PRN Engineering, a technical writing and market consulting company. Prior to these organizations, he spent about a dozen years as a contributing editor to Chip Design magazine. Concurrent with Chip Design, he was also the technical editorial manager at Maxim Integrated Products, and prior to Maxim, Dave spent over 35 years working as an engineer for the U.S. Army Electronics Command and an editor with Electronic Design Magazine.