VSC7281

The VSC7281 is a Dual XAUI Single XGMII Transceiver tailored for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) and 10 Gigabit Fibre Channel (10GFC) applications. The feature set and flexibility of these devices make them perfectly suited for Backplane and other Serial Interconnect applications such as Serial Rapid I/O, PCI Express and XAUI.

With four channels of serial transmitter/receiver pairs, these transceivers can deliver a duplex data rate of greater than 20 Gbps. These serial channels can be configured for independent operation, or as fully 10GbE/10GFC compliant XAUI (10 Gigabit Attachment Unit Interface) serial buses. The parallel bus is fully XGMII (10 Gigabit Media Independent Interface) compliant. When independent channel operation is required, the parallel bus can be configured for either 8- or 10-bit operation with the ability to enable or bypass the internal 8B/10B encoders/decoders.

No additional external logic is required for the basic operation of this device. However, for flexibility and systems adaptability, an MDIO (Management Data Input/Output) interface is provided for internal register access. These registers are MDIO compliant and allow for monitoring and configuration of special modes for diagnostics, BIST (Built-In-Self Test), and various control of special channel features, such as pre-emphasis, cable equalization, reduced output swing, loopback, signal detection and XAUI port selection.

The flexibility of this VSC7281 is not only seen in the MDIO register programmable feature set, but also in a wide range of supported frequencies. With a serial data rate that can range from 0.95 Gbps to 3.25 Gbps, this device supports multiple communication applications such as Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, and Ethernet. The VSC7281 has the functionality to support these common rates simultaneous with a single external reference clock.

Whether the application is a high-speed backplane, chassis-tochassis communication or an optical link, these devices can provide the flexibility and reliability required in today's high-end Data Communication systems.