Vitesse adds to industry’s largest family of 11.5Gbps crosspoint switches

CAMARILLO, USA: Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. unveiled another innovation to its industry-leading signal integrity portfolio with the availability of the VSC3316, a new 16-port asynchronous crosspoint switch with enhanced FlexEQ signal equalization capabilities.

The VSC3316 is the highest speed crosspoint available with 16 lanes, each with the ability to operate independently from DC up to 11.5 Gbps. Housed in the industry’s smallest available 15mm x 15mm footprint for this size switch matrix, the VSC3316 enables new possibilities to expand line card and switch card bandwidth by 75 percent over existing solutions while overcoming legacy backplane signal integrity issues.

The device is ideal for transmitting multi-gigabit data signals over printed circuit boards, backplane connectors, and copper cabling used across a range of communications equipment including Core and Metro routers, blade servers, network storage equipment, broadcast video routers, and physical layer switches.

“Telecom, datacomm, networking, and Ethernet protocols are all converging at the 10 Gbps node, requiring high-performance signal integrity products to route, switch and clean up these signals at rates up to 11.5Gbps,” said Juan Garza, product marketing manager for Vitesse.

“With a long-standing history of delivering products with unique capabilities such as the VSC3316, Vitesse clearly understands this migration and is uniquely positioned to enable customers to create devices that the marketplace demands.”

Unique feature set
Capable of 11.5 Gbps per lane bandwidth, the VSC3316 includes detection/transmission of signal (LOS) providing native Out-of-Band (OOB) support of SAS/SATA storage protocols. This architecture also provides protocol transparent operation, thereby allowing each channel to run independently.

Supporting the latest high-speed protocols, Vitesse’s VSC3316 supports a wide frequency range encompassing virtually all data protocols including Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), XAUI, Reduced XAUI (RXAUI), 10GBASE-KR, SAS, SATA, 1G/2G/4G/8G/10G Fibre Channel, PCIe Gen 1/2/3 and InfiniBand.

The combined functions of crosspoint switching and Vitesse’s leading FlexEQ adaptive equalization technology make the VSC3316 a highly cost-effective, low-power signal integrity tool useful wherever there are high-speed signals.

The VSC3316 incorporates a broadband, fully non-blocking and multicasting switch core and flexible fourth-generation equalization and pre-emphasis I/O capability. Offering maximum architectural flexibility in switching and routing connections, the device can perform signal fan-out, loop-back and protection switching while also regenerating signals otherwise compromised by losses in the transmission medium.

Vitesse’s FlexEQ adaptive equalization capability works independently of the data rate, providing highly effective compensation for deterministic jitter across a wide range of operating conditions without requiring re-tuning.

World-class signal integrity
Vitesse was first to introduce integrated signal equalization in crosspoints switches and now has nearly a decade of successful product developments and dozens of products in production.

With the introduction of dual time constant equalization, Vitesse’s latest-generation FlexEQ technology enables a new level of signal integrity engineering. FlexEQ adaptive equalization technology allows the system designer to compensate for multiple impairments in the signal path, such as connectors and cabling or skin effect and dielectric losses in PCB traces.

FlexEQ also provides a significantly wider compensation range, so a single device can be used in multiple applications, from PCB traces to backplanes to copper cabling. Learn more about FlexEQ at www.vitesse.com/flexeq.

Pricing and availability
The VSC3316 operates on a single 2.5V supply with a typical per-channel power dissipation of 200mW and is available in a high-density 15mm x 15mm, 196-pin PBGA package. General samples are available now, with volume pricing available upon request.