PCIe 4.0 switching for CompactPCI Serial systems
The Dolphin MXC960 is part of the Dolphin PCI Express interconnect portfolio offered by ECRIN Systems. It is designed as a switching building block for CompactPCI Serial systems combining multiple processor boards and PCI Express I/O resources.
The board uses a Microchip Switchtec PFX PCI Express Gen4 switch and provides 40 PCIe backplane lanes operating at up to 16 GT/s per lane.
Its PCIe backplane pinout follows PICMG® CPCI-S.0 R2.0 for the standard 40 lanes and supports configurations including up to five x8 links plus one x4 link.
Multi-CPU communication and I/O sharing
The MXC960 enables multiple CPUs within the backplane to communicate and share I/O devices.
By loading the appropriate firmware, the module supports Transparent and Non-Transparent Bridging (NTB) operation for clustering and I/O expansion use cases. Combined with Dolphin eXpressWare, it can also participate in multi-computer resource-sharing and reflective-memory configurations.
These functions are particularly relevant to Information & Communication Systems where several computing nodes or subsystems must exchange data efficiently. They are also suitable for selected industrial applications such as computing platforms, test systems, data acquisition and OEM multi-computer systems.
External PCIe connectivity
Four front-panel SFF-8644 connectors provide external PCI Express connectivity.
The four ports can be used as four independent x4 links, two x8 links or one x16 link. This enables CompactPCI Serial systems to connect to other cPCI-S chassis, PXIe systems, standard PCIe servers, I/O devices and expansion units.
Documented cabling solutions use copper or optical fibre, with connection lengths from 0.5 to 100 metres depending on cable technology and configuration.
Integrated Gigabit Ethernet switching
The MXC960 also integrates a Broadcom BCM53158 Gigabit Ethernet switch.
Eight Gigabit Ethernet ports connect to the CompactPCI Serial backplane, while two Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports are available on the front panel. The front-panel Ethernet interfaces operate at fixed Gigabit Ethernet speed without auto-negotiation.
The combination of PCIe 4.0 and Gigabit Ethernet switching in a single 3U module provides two complementary interconnect technologies within the same CompactPCI Serial platform.
On-board M.2 NVMe storage
An on-board M.2 Key M 2280 connector provides PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe support.
With eXpressWare, the NVMe device can be assigned to one of the connected CPU modules and shared with other processors across the PCIe network according to the selected system configuration.
From a COTS switch to a complete CompactPCI Serial system
The MXC960 can be integrated as a technology building block within a larger platform combining processor boards, I/O, GPUs, FPGAs, storage and external interconnects.
This fits directly within ECRIN Systems' COTS and Modified COTS approach, which uses standard technologies such as CompactPCI Serial and other open form factors within complete embedded systems.
ECRIN Systems can also support project definition and management, followed by production and system integration and obsolescence management when long-term configuration control is required.
