Sandburst Supplies Merchant Silicon for 10GigE Boxes

Sandburst Corporation and Accton Technology Corporation of Taiwan announced a reference design for a 10 Gigabit Ethernet MetroBox switching platform which the companies are positioning as a "category killer" due to its line rate IPv6 switching performance, scalability and low-cost.



The MetroBox, designed by Accton, features Sandburst's HiBeam packet switching chipset. It supports 20 ports of Gigabit Ethernet and two 10-Gigabit uplinks. The 40-gigabit platform delivers packet forwarding capabilities including IPv4 and IPv6 forwarding and Ethernet bridging. The non-blocking architecture supports MPLS, VPLS, stacked VLANs, and VLAN translation.



Sandburst said its HiBeam chipset uses a packet-optimized approach to context resolution that enables it to determine the packet's destination, bandwidth and behavioral rules without succumbing to the software intensive packet analysis and look-up functions that degrade the performance of conventional network processors. This enables wire-speed decisions on different parts of the packet (such as L2 and L3) simultaneously. The MetroBox offers simultaneous IPv6, IPv4 and MPLS support at line rate. It has an integrated fabric capacity of 80 Gbps and supports aggregate forwarding of 60 Mpps with address tables capable of supporting up to 128K MAC addresses, 128K IPv4 prefixes/hosts, or 32K IPv6 prefixes/hosts. Additionally, the HiBeam chipset can scale to support architectures with an aggregate system capacity of nearly 1 billion packets per second, with up to 1.28 Tbps of cross-connect bandwidth.



Accton Technology Corporation of Taiwan will manufacture and supply the MetroBox to network equipment OEMs. http://www.sandburst.comhttp://www.accton.com