Southborough, Massachusetts-based Chipcom Corp has launched the Midnight Bridge which transparently connects Ethernet and IEEE 802.3 local area networks. It features 20,000 packets per second filtering and a forwarding rate of 10,000 packets per second. Unlike conventional bridges, which use software filtering, Midnight Bridge uses hardware dedicated to speeding up the filtering operation and a high-speed, multi-port memory gives the IEEE 802.3 controllers in the bridge and the central processing unit, reserved access to common packet memory. Midnight Bridge uses flash, erasable programmable ROMs to protect against obsolescence, with field-downloadable firmware, including an upgrade procedure with the reliability of ROM-based software, the company says. Also, all operational firmware is stored in permanent memory within each Midnight Bridge, enabling immediate recovery from power failures. Midnight Bridge’s IEEE 802.1 (d) Spanning Tree algorithm provides easy configuration and also redundancy for large networks, which enables a bridge to act as a backup for one or several others. The bridge also provides network management facilities for performance monitoring and fine-tuning. These functions can be accessed locally at the bridge and through the Ethernet, with in-band (RS-232-C) and out-of-band (Ethernet) access. The bridge supports distances of three miles and for long distance backbone applications, it is available with one or two fibre optic interfaces. It is compatible with Chipcom’s Online System Concentrator, a faulttolerant system for faculty networks. The Midnight Bridge is available in three stand-alone versions: baseband-to-baseband, baseband-to-fibre and fibre-to-fibre. The three versions are $2,950, $3,450 and $3,950 respectively.
