Vitesse Semiconductor, a provider of IC offerings for carrier and enterprise networks, has unveiled Caracal family of ethernet switches (VSC7428, VSC7429) for carrier ethernet, mobile backhaul and fiber-to-the-home (FTTx) passive optical networks (PON) applications.
The company said that the new Caracal switches feature network timing and performance monitoring capabilities that are required for migrating mobile backhaul or packet-based 3G and 4G wireless networks. With new swithches, packet-based networks for wireless backhaul can replace TDM networks.
According to Vitesse Semiconductor, the new Caracal switches boast a MEF services-oriented hardware and software architecture and implements both synchronous ethernet and one step and two step modes of IEEE 1588v2 in hardware for timing precision.
The Caracal’s integrated support for ethernet operations, administration and maintenance (OAM), including full hardware-based continuity check messages provides protection switching in less than 50ms. These features, combined with Vitesse’s carrier ethernet software offerings enable migration to packet networks from currently deployed SONET/SDH networks, the company said.
Vitese said that Caracal devices are fully featured carrier ethernet switches with integrated Cu PHYs and MIPS processor. The integrated dual media PHY enables a hardware design with flexible combination of copper and optical ports, while the MIPS processor can run customer management and control software.
In addition, the new devices embed Vitesse’s EcoEthernet 2.0 green technology and provides up to 11 SGMII ports and eight gigabit Cu PHYs, while the VSC7429 (Caracal-2) provides 26-ports with combinations of 12 copper PHYs, 12 SGMII, and three QSMII ports. Both devices have 10/100/1000Mbps ports, with two ports supporting 10/100/1000 and 2.5Gbps.
