Enhance IP routing with new high-speed packet switching chip

Mitel Semiconductor has announced the DS313, a single chip distributed switch for Layer 2, 3, and 4 packet forwarding and filtering in LANs. The device includes 12 Fast Ethernet ports and one gigabit port, and operates at full wire-speed. A full suite of advanced features includes enhanced Quality of Service (QoS), Layer 3 routing, IP Multicast, protocol filtering, port mirroring, port trunking, buffer management and stacking.

The chip is the latest member of the XF2080 family to support advanced network management software and QoS standards for packet prioritisation. It is highly integrated to reduce the overall system chip count and glue logic. Full wire-speed Layer 3 IP switching is provided by performing IP address searches based on a longest prefix-match. The device supports up to 22K IP subnets per chip or 64K MAC addresses per chip and per system and is capable of routing over 6,000 IP addresses.

Time sensitive traffic such as voice and video are prioritised and the output is sorted into four different QoS classifications based on L4 TCP/UDP source or destination port number: IP address; DS/TOS field; Layer 2 MAC address; and VLAN priority field in VLAN tag. Once the packets are mapped into a queue, they are scheduled using one of the following transmission control schemes: strict priority, WRR (Weighted Round Robin) and dynamic priority.

The DS313's Xpipe interface allows multiple DS313's to be interconnected using the SF240, a switch fabric chip. Up to 8 chips can be connected through the 3.2Gbps Xpipe to form a non-blocking Layer 3 switch. When combined with VerSA, the DS313 provides a complete solution for adding IP routing switches to wiring closet stacks.

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