Solve the problem of too many wires in high-speed network equipment

Today's high-speed communications devices, such as rack-mounted (ToR) switches, routers, servers, and storage, are at the forefront, most powerful, and well-designed protagonists of the data center. These devices contain impressive circuitry, multiple ports for speeds above 25Gbps, and complex switch-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and sophisticated signal conditioning equipment.

It is easy to overlook that for each high-speed port (Small Pluggable Interface (SFP), Quad Small Form Factor Pluggable Interface (QSFP), Serial Attached Small Computer System Interface (SAS), etc., there are four to nine Port-related low speed signals need to be managed. This means that for high port count systems (such as 48 port ToR switches), there may be more than 400 low speed signals. This will use a lot of wires!

To manage all of these signals, typical design implementations involve high pin count field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), I2C multiplexers, shift registers, LED drivers, and additional printed circuit board (PCB) layers. These methods are difficult to implement, the boards are crowded, and they are not easily scalable—until now. TI's FPC401 four-port controller provides a simpler solution to this design challenge.

The resulting system reduces board signal paths by a factor of 100, reduces the number of FPGA pins by a factor of 100, eliminates many discrete components that take up space, and simplifies port management overall—see Figure 1.

Figure 1: Traditional solutions and FPC401-based solutions

The FPC401 integrates all low-speed signals from up to 56 ports into a single fast I2C bus (up to 1MHz) or serial peripheral interface (SPI) bus (up to 10 MHz), greatly reducing line complexity and simplifying design scalability Sex. Each of the four ports of the FPC401 has three inputs, four outputs, and an I2C master for complete control of downstream modules. See Figure 2 for an example of SFP and QSFP connections.

Figure 2: Simplified schematic of the FPC401 for typical applications

Each input has an interrupt generation feature that reports important events to the host, such as modules that are not inserted. With multiple general-purpose outputs and two dedicated outputs, it has advanced LED drive capability to control flicker and brightness. Each port's I2C master works independently and can read and write all ports simultaneously. The FPC 401 has the functionality to simplify system software, such as periodic prefetching of module data and processing module I2C protocol failures. The best part is that the FPC401 is small enough to fit under the SFP or QSFP package at the bottom of the board.

The downloadable C library allows the FPC401 to be integrated into your system to become a seamless process. The FPC401EVM evaluation board allows you to test the functionality of the FPC401 using your own host controller or the onboard MSP430TM microcontroller.

Many high-speed applications can easily forget many low-speed signals. With the help of the FPC401, you can quickly implement this part of the circuit, turning your focus to the more important high-speed part of the design.

Other resources

· Learn more about the FPC401 port controller.

· Download the FPC401 data sheet.

· Interested in high speed systems? Check out the blog posts in the Eye Doctor blog series:

· "Eye doctor: Why too much equalization is not conducive to serial links."

· Eye doctor: Reflection and how to handle reflections in high-speed systems.

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