OVERVIEW

The ETT1TM Chip Set provides a crossbar-based switch core which is capable of switching cells between 32 ports with each port operating at data rates up to 10 Gbit/s. This section describes the main features of the switch core and how cells flow through a complete system that is based on the ETT1 Chip Set.

This document often refers to port rates of OC-192c or OC-48c. The ETT1 Chip Set itself operates at a fixed cell rate of 25M cells per second per port and thus is unaware of the actual data rate of the attached link. So a switch might be 32 ports of OC-192c, or it could be 32 ports of 10 Gbit/s Ethernet; it is the internal cell rate that is determined by the ETT1 Chip Set, not the link technology.

ETT1 Switch Core Features

The ETT1 switch core provides the following features:

? 320 Gbit/s aggregate bandwidth - up to 32 ports of 10 Gbit/s bandwidth each

? Each port can be configured as 4 x OC-48c or 1 x OC-192c

? Both port configurations support four priorities of best-effort traffic for unicast and multicast data traffic

? TDM support for guaranteed bandwidth and zero delay variation with 10 Mbit/s channel resolution

? LCSTM protocol supports a physical separation of switch core and linecards up to 200 feet (70 m)

? Virtual output queues to eliminate head-of-line blocking on unicast cells

? Internal speedup to provide near-output-queued performance

? Cells are transferred using a credit mechanism to avoid cell losses due to buffer overrun

? In-band management and control via Control Packets

? Out-of-band management and control via a dedicated CPU interface

? Optional redundancy of all shared components for fault tolerance

? Efficient support for multicast with cell replication performed within the switch core