Peripheral Slot Card for CompactPCI Serial Systems

The board has a modular Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch fabric up to 20 ports. The 5 GbE ports are wired to associate RJ45 front panel jacks and another 14 GbE ports are available for rear I/O via the STRADA Whisper backplane connectors P5/P6. The circuit is equipped with a maximum of four 88E6350R GbE switches. Each of them provides 5 ports with integrated Ethernet transceivers (PHY) and two digital interfaces (RGMII). The switches are coupled together with their RGMII interfaces. A total of 20 PHY ports is available on-board, wired to the front panel and to the CompactPCI Serial backplane connectors P5/P6. One PHY port is connected to the on-board GbE controller. The project can be inserted into any CompactPCI Serial peripheral slot. A single PCI Express lane would be sufficient for communication with the on-board GbE controller.

The peripheral devices that use slot cards for data transfer include graphics adapter cards, network (NICs), storage accelerator devices and other high-performance externals. The design can be utilized in providing lower latency and higher data transfer rates than parallel buses.