3U OpenVPX GbE switch
ProductJuly 26, 2010
Alice Moss
Military Embedded Systems
Chris A. Ciufo
General Micro Systems, Inc.
The verdict's in, folks: Ethernet is the winner. So it's no wonder that more defense systems than ever use Ethernet as the high-speed conduit on- and off-board. Kontron's Gigabit Ethernet Switch VX3910 performs enterprise-class switching functionality on 28 ports.
The verdict’s in, folks: Ethernet is the winner. So it’s no wonder that more defense systems than ever use Ethernet as the high-speed conduit on- and off-board. Kontron’s Gigabit Ethernet Switch VX3910 performs enterprise-class switching functionality on 28 ports. It also has advanced management features, like you’d expect to find in carrier-grade switches. Even better: It’s available in VITA VPX (VITA 46.x) and OpenVPX (ANSI/VITA 65) versions, in 3U size and in air- and conduction-cooled formats.
There are 20 Gigabit ports available to the backplane, four 2.5 Gigabit ports to the backplane for redundancy in multi-switch systems, and an additional four 1000BASE-T uplinks on the front panel in air-cooled versions (shown). Conduction-cooled boards operate at -40 °C to +85 °C. Kontron’s Embedded Network Technology design keeps the same feature set and interfaces in these modules as in other Kontron boards, simplifying programming and interoperability. Ethernet ports are provided by Broadcom silicon, and the system controller is an AMCC PowerPC switch device with customizable software and comprehensive firmware. L2 (and optional L3) switching is supported, as is VLAN tagging (IEEE 802.3ac), dynamic VLAN registration (IEEE 802.1Q), and QoS (IEEE 802.1p).
