Design of industrial managed L2 switch

Customer

Manufacturer of rugged and industrial communication equipment.

Task

To develop a line of industrial managed gigabit switch equipment with 8 and 16 ports.

Solution

We created reference designs of industrial managed switches with 10Gbase-X and 10/100/1000Base-T ports. The hardware platform of these layer 2 networking devices was based on the Microchip VSC74xx switch controller and Linux kernel.

Microchip (ex. Microsemi) is a market-leading IC vendor of industrial Ethernet switching, PHY, SyncE PLL and PoE technology. That's why our engineers decided to use the Microchip VSC74xx switch controller to design a custom industrial switch appliance.

The VSC74xx controller has 500 MHz MIPS CPU and enables full management of Layer 2 and Layer 3 Ethernet switch solutions. A sophisticated and well-documented SDK allowed fast development and integration of software functions.

The designed network switch appliances feature:

• 2 or 4 10Gbase-X ports for SFP and SFP+ modules
• 8 or 16 10/100/1000Base-T ports, PoE enabled
• RS-232 and USB-device ports for console
• USB-2.0 host for removable media

Software functions of the switches:

• Embedded web-interface
• IPv4/v6 support
• NTP server/client
• DHCP server/client
• BootP
• PTPv2
• IGMP snooping
• SNMP v1/2/3

The standards supported:

• IEEE 802.1D – Spanning Tree Protocol
• IEEE 802.1w – Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol
• IEEE 802.1ag – Connectivity Fault Management
• IEEE 802.3ad for Port Trunk with LACP
• IEEE 802.1s – Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol
• IEEE 802.1Q – VLAN tagging
• IEEE 802.1p – Class of Service
• IEEE 802.1X – Authentication
• IEEE 802.1ax – Link Aggregation