Largest Cross Point Switch Has 25,600 Switching Paths At 6.5 Gbits/s

The 160-by-160 M21165 cross point switch from Mindspeed Technologies provides up to 25,600 unique switching paths, making it the largest cross point switch on a single die, according to the company (see the figure). Each of the paths is capable of frequencies and data rates to 6.5 Gbits/s.

The target applications for this non-blocking and fully protocol- agnostic switch include broadcast video routing and switching, blade server storage, and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM). Other uses include HDMI, DVI, KVM, and Displayport switching, backplane switching and signal conditioning, Sonet/ SDH, Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet, XAUI, and wireless basestations.

The M21165’s 40-dB rangeprogrammable equalization on each input permits control and removal of deterministic jitter. Its 6-dB range-programmable output de-emphasis improves reach and jitter control. The chip supports video pathological patterns and can be configured to switch each channel individually or in a group of four channels with low intrachannel skew.

The various options of the switch and switch state can be configured with registers accessed through both twowire I²C, four-wire serial peripheral interfaces (SPIs), or through an 8-bit parallel interface. It offers individual per lane loss of signal alarms and a standard JTAG interface. And, its integrated temperature sensors ease failure diagnosis.

The M21165 operates with a 1.2-V dc core with 1.2-, 1.8-, or 2.5-V I/O. Power consumption is typically 22 W. The package is a 45- by 45-mm 1936-ball thermally enhanced plastic ball-grid array (TEPBGA). The price is $1200 in prototype quantities. Samples are available now with full production scheduled for the third quarter of 2009. An 80-by-80 cross point version called the M21145 is also available.

LOUIS E. FRENZEL