Based On The The ATCA Architecture Of SwitchCard Improvement

With the development of optical transmission technology, the transmission link isno longer a major factor in limiting the backbone network capacity, and the networkcore nodes switching equipment has become a performance bottleneck to improvenetwork communication. As the switch cards of ATCA architecture has obviousadvantages in data transmission capability, data processing computing power,hardware, system management capabilities, hardware, power and cooling capacity, sothe switching cards of this architecture gradually get promotion in the backbonenetwork equipment. Currently, the design and implementation of switch card still havesome deficiencies, so the improvement of switch cards is the new breakthrough toenhance the performance of network communications.This article relies on the switch card development project of Beijing Rui SecurityTechnology Co., Ltd, it mainly describes about the design improvements and featureimplementation of the three building blocks of switch cards: fabric channel module,base channel modules and hardware management module IPMC. First, it transplantsthe Linux operating system to the switch card; Secondly, successfully modify andtransplanted the SDK to Broadcom’s BCM56844chip, and implement Layer2switching, Layer routing, QOS and other functions of fabric channel module; Then,using BCM5396switch chip of Broadcom company, and transplanted thecorresponding SDK to this switch chip, implement control and management functionsof base channel module; Furthermore, add serial communication channel between thehost CPU and the IPMC at the hardware management module(IPMC), andprogramming to achieve the main control communication between the CPU and theIPMC to get the switch card hardware information according to IPMI communicationprotocol, and solve the problem that, without Shelf manager module in ATCA chassis,it cannot get the hardware information of the switch cards and the business cards inATCA chassis.Finally, using three experiments, the MAC address forwarding experiment,IPMC functional verification and fabric channel test totest and verify the functionalityand performance of switch card. The MAC address forwarding experimental verification the normal operation of the switch card base channel module; the IPMCfunctional verification showed that the host CPU of switch card can effectively readsthe temperature, slots and other hardware information of switch cards and otherbusiness cards chassis; the fabric channel test is transmitting about10G data rate fromthe front panel of switch card to other business cards, the information statisticsbetween the business card and switch card proves that the switch capacity of theswitchcard meets the design requirements.