Xelerated Delivers Programmable Ethernet Switch in a Chip

Carrier Ethernet chipset company Xelerated has come out with a family of highly integrated HX300 network processors, which include integrated traffic management and fully-programmable Ethernet switching capabilities, for fiber access applications.

For service providers, the density in this 100gigE solution enables line costs – including network- and customer-side gear – of less than $100, explained Rod Kay, general manager for Xelerated’s U.S. operations. Traditional Carrier Ethernet solutions tend to fall into the $400 per line range, he said.

The HX300 addresses various access technologies, including GPON, EPON and active Ethernet. The solution supports 16 GPONs per line card, and without the need for a separate carrier Ethernet switch, noted Kay.

And because the embedded Ethernet switch is programmable, carriers can go to market with pre-standard services and scale those services, making any needed tweaks to the gear later and without interrupting service, Kay said.

As for the traffic management capability, the HX300 features what is called a Dataflow, as opposed to a RISC-based, architecture, Kay explained. The HX300 also looks only at traffic headers, not into what can be bulky traffic payloads. All this means resource contention is not an issue for the HX300, which operates at wire speed. Kay added that the HX300 products offer very granular traffic management, supporting classification, policy, queue management and more.

“We integrate traffic management on the chip,” said Kay. “We don’t drop packets in any scenario.

“We’re focused very squarely on egress traffic management,” continued Kay.

The HX300 family will begin sampling in the fourth quarter. The company declined to provide pricing information for the products.

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