Acromag XMC-6260 and XMC-6280 mezzanine modules

Acromag’s XMC-6260 and XMC-6280 mezzanine modules provide a 10-gigabit ethernet (10GbE) interface solution for data-intensive, real-time embedded computing systems. High performance is achieved using a TCP/IP offload engine (TOE) ASIC connected to a PCI Express Gen2 x8 interface.

The XMC-6260 has dual XAUI 10GBase-KX4 ports and supports conduction-cooling or -40 to 85°C operation. The XMC-6280 features four SFP+ ports for fibre or copper cables. Applications include high-speed data storage, image collection/transfer, distributed control networks and board-to-board interfaces. All versions are available with lead or lead-free solder.

The network interface modules pair a purpose-built, multiprotocol processor with up to four channels of 10GbE connectivity. This offloads TCP overhead tasks from the host CPU to maintain maximum computing speeds. An 8-lane PCIe host interface provides a high-speed connection to the system processor. With support for 5 Gbps data rates, the PCIe interface delivers up to 32 Gbps of bandwidth to the server.

The fully integrated network interface cards (NIC) employ the Chelsio T4 processor. This ASIC has four 10GbE interfaces and supports up to 1M connections. 5 Gb of DDR3 memory enhances the number of virtual connections. The T4 chip provides full offload support for TCP, UDP, iSCSI and FCoE. Other functions include packet switching, traffic filtering and management.

The TOE ASIC has hundreds of programmable registers for protocol configuration and offload control. As a result, the modules can offload TCP processing per connection, per server, per interface. They can also tunnel traffic from non-offloaded connections to the host processor for the native TCP/IP stack to process. The modules provide a flexible zero-copy capability for regular TCP connections to deliver line rate performance with minimal CPU usage.

The network interface cards can provide powerful packet switching and routing capabilities. The cards integrate a high-performance packet switch, which allows switching of traffic from any of the input ports to any of the output ports (wire-to-wire) and from any of the output ports to any of the input ports (host-to-host).