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Mindspeed Broadens Family Of Crosspoint Switches

Mindspeed Technologies Inc announced it has extended its industry-leading family of crosspoint switches to offer high-speed switching capabilities across a wider range of storage, local and wide area networking applications. The new 2x2 and 4x4 crosspoint switches integrate the company's patented Amplif-Eye signal-conditioning technology with signal monitoring and testability features.

The 2x2 M21102, M21103, and M21104 and the 4x4 M21105 and M21107 crosspoint switches include integrated per-channel, multi-rate clock and data recovery (CDR) circuits at speed grades ranging from 42 Mb per second to 3.2 Gb per second.

The new devices enable customers to reduce debug time and monitor the real-time health of networks more efficiently and cost-effectively. Furthermore, the integrated pseudo-random bit sequence (PRBS) generator allows customers to perform board-level diagnostics without expensive test equipment.

"These devices provide monitoring features for bringing-up and diagnosing systems with minimal cost and time," said Paul Duran, product line manager for Mindspeed. "The multi-rate capability of these devices strongly positions Mindspeed to penetrate the storage and enterprise markets, while giving customers the flexibility to utilize a single solution for multiple applications."

Technical Details

The crosspoint switches integrate a unique output pre-emphasis technology that operates without the need for a recovered clock. The integrated adaptive equalization feature is capable of supporting multiple data rates over 60" of FR-4 board material and multiple connectors at 3.2Gb per second. The crosspoint switches can be configured through either an I2C interface, or alternatively via hardware pins, thereby eliminating the need for an external micro-controller. The devices also have clock output options for every channel eliminating the need for costly clock synthesizers.

The new devices support DC-Coupled connections to CML, LVPECL, and Infiniband for design flexibility. The I/O polarity can also be programmed for ease of layout. The switches support any combination of OC-48, OC-48 with forward error correction (FEC), Fibre Channel (1x, 2x, 10x), Infiniband, Gigabit Ethernet, Serial-ATA (1.5Gb per second, 3Gb per second) and XAUI data rates.

Typical power consumption for the M21102/3/4 2x2 crosspoint switches is 300mW. In case of the M21105/7 4x4 crosspoint switches, the power consumption is as low as 420mW with all channels and CDRs configured and active. Moreover, the CDRs enable hot swapping of line or switch cards for added system benefits.