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

 

Project results

Our customer received a series of new products for simple network management.

Promwad engineering team rendered the following services to the customer:

— Specification development and components selection
— Schematic design and PCB layout
— Mechanical design and thermal simulation
— Prototypes manufacturing
— Board bring-up with u-boot and Linux kernel
— Vendor SDK integration

 

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