Erlang Technology, Inc. today announced the availability of its new flagship switch fabric chipset boasting the fastest scalability, shorter time-to-market and other benefits for a myriad of routing and switching applications in the communications, wireless and storage markets.
The Erlang Network Element Technology (ENET) Xe chipset is the company's second generation ASIC-based switch fabric chipset. A non-blocking switch fabric, the ENET Xe enables the fastest scalability to one terabit per second, supports variable-length packets and much more, making it ideal for interfacing to multi-vendor traffic managers, network processors (NPU) and in-house ASIC implementations.
The ENET Xe's non-blocking and variable-length packet processing features overcome scalability bottlenecks that exist in conventional output buffered switch fabrics while requiring no off-chip memory. The Xe can process variable-length packets from one byte to 16 KB. The Xe also incorporates industry-standardized interfaces such as CSIX-L1, L3, NPSI, POS-PHY, SPI-3 and SPI-4 to seamlessly interface to merchant NPUs from vendors such as Agere Systems, AMCC, Intel and Motorola. In the end, the Xe provides a flexible, reliable and cost-effective switch fabric solution for high capacity switch and router systems requiring fast and seamless scalability up to one Tb/s.
The Xe chipset is protocol independent, supporting all types of traffic, from IP and ATM to TDM and Ethernet traffic, and provides sophisticated support for QoS through Erlang's proprietary Train-Queuing technique. Other service features include support for Multicasting, Broadcasting, Strict Priority and Weighted Fair Queue scheduling, and High Availability. A system built with the ENET Xe consists of two devices, the XeI for interposer and the XeC for the switching core. As the two chips interface to each other through a high speed XAUI interface, fewer links are needed to communicate with each other compared to competitive solutions. The XeC can be configured to operate in three modes: Ingress Queue Manager Mode, Core Switch Mode, and Egress Queue Manager Mode. The XeI is a 10 Gb/s full duplex interposer device that supports up to four 2.5 Gb/s NPUs for full-duplex traffic. It can also perform as a single-chip 4 x 2.5 Gb/s switch fabric, while providing excellent QoS support. The XeI is the data and control path glue between an NPU and the XeC.
A 10 Gb/s version of XeI will connect to popular 10 Gb/s NPUs through an SPI-4 interface. The interface between the XeI and XeC occurs via multiple 3.125 Gb/s high speed serial links, which are also used between multiple XeC devices.
