Erlang Unveils Xe Switch Fabric

ST. LOUIS -- Erlang Technology, Inc. today announced the availability of its new flagship switch fabric chipset boasting the fastest scalability, shorter time-to-market and other benefits that make it ideal for a myriad of routing and switching applications in the communications, wireless and storage markets. The Erlang Network Element Technology (ENET) Xe chipset is the company’s second generation ASIC-based switch fabric chipset. A non-blocking switch fabric, the ENET Xe enables the fastest scalability to one terabit per second, supports variable-length packets and much more, making it ideal for interfacing to multi-vendor traffic managers, network processors (NPU) and in-house ASIC implementations.

The ENET Xe’s non-blocking and variable-length packet processing features overcome scalability bottlenecks that exist in conventional output buffered switch fabrics while requiring no off-chip memory. The Xe can process variable-length packets from one byte to 16 KB. The Xe also incorporates industry-standardized interfaces such as CSIX-L1, L3, NPSI, POS-PHY, SPI-3 and SPI-4 to seamlessly interface to merchant NPUs from vendors such as Agere Systems, AMCC, Intel and Motorola. In the end, the Xe provides a flexible, reliable and cost-effective switch fabric solution for high capacity switch and router systems requiring fast and seamless scalability up to one Tb/s.

The Xe chipset is protocol independent, supporting all types of traffic, from IP and ATM to TDM and Ethernet traffic, and provides sophisticated support for QoS through Erlang’s proprietary Train-Queuing™ technique. Other service features include support for Multicasting, Broadcasting, Strict Priority and Weighted Fair Queue scheduling, and High Availability.

A system built with the ENET Xe consists of two devices, the XeI™ for interposer and the XeC™ for the switching core. As the two chips interface to each other through a high speed XAUI interface, fewer links are needed to communicate with each other compared to competitive solutions. The XeC can be configured to operate in three modes: Ingress Queue Manager Mode, Core Switch Mode, and Egress Queue Manager Mode. The XeI is a 10 Gb/s full duplex interposer device that supports up to four 2.5 Gb/s NPUs for full-duplex traffic. It can also perform as a single-chip 4 x 2.5 Gb/s switch fabric, while providing excellent QoS support. The XeI is the data and control path glue between an NPU and the XeC.

A 10 Gb/s version of XeI will connect to popular 10 Gb/s NPUs through an SPI-4 interface. The interface between the XeI and XeC occurs via multiple 3.125 Gb/s high speed serial links, which are also used between multiple XeC devices.

“The ENET Xe is the pinnacle of more than 10 years of switch fabric chipset design and several design wins behind Erlang Technology,” said Dr. Paul Min, CEO of Erlang Technology. “The fruits of our labor are evident in the excellent features the Xe brings to market. The Xe boasts excellent forward-thinking features such as handling packet sizes from one to 16 kilobytes for greater use in applications with different NPUs and traffic managers, and also in systems addressing the Resilient Packet Protocol (RPR). We also optimized the queuing by handling internal transfers at 32 byte granularity, as well as many other advanced capabilities. We’re confident the Xe will exceed the cost, performance and integration needs of our customers worldwide.”

Erlang Technology Inc.