Programmable Switching

Industry's First Device to Combine Switching and Programmable Processing

As broadband services and Carrier Ethernet standards evolve, fiber access switching requirements keep changing. This is why access switches tend to age quickly. Too quickly, many service providers around the globe told us. They are concerned about the lifetime of their planned high-capacity fiber access networks.

Programmable Ethernet Switches combine a shared memory non-blocking Ethernet
switch with a programmable pipeline. At Xelerated, we thought about this problem.
What if we could leverage the dataflow architecture and customize it for the
cost-sensitive fiber access market?

The result of our efforts is a fiber access-optimized Carrier Ethernet device, the Programmable Ethernet Switch. It constitutes a new category of packet processing chips. They are programmable as in network processors, however cost-optimized for a specific application as in merchant fixed-function Ethernet switches.

In residential broadband, IPTV multicast formats and PVR traffic management evolve with multicast and session management implications to the access switching infrastructure. Session and subscriber management, and mobile and fixed broadband convergence are other areas where service providers are looking for freedom of architectural choices moving forward.

Taking a fixed-function Ethernet ASIC and tweak it to perform in accordance to today's set of requirements is just not good enough for next generation fiber access solutions. This is why we added programmability to the chip design.

But as important, the chip has been purposely engineered to achieve the right cost level. The programmable Ethernet switch features:

• Non-blocking shared memory switch for uniform packet switching, multicast and stacking functionality.
• All-Ethernet design with integrated Ethernet PHY and MAC enables low-cost solutions.
• Support for cost-effective aggregation designs using stacked pizza boxes, XAUI-based backplanes and simplified I/O cards.
• Access-customized programmable pipeline. Service density (number of operations per packet) optimized for access data plane software.
• On-chip table memory sizes and bandwidth to off-chip table, meter and counter memories optimized for unified fiber access applications.
• Optional access traffic management is feature compatible to service edge-sized versions. Number of queues adopted to the access market requirements.

Programmable Ethernet Switching is implemented in the AX product family.