The MXC948 switch is designed to create a flexible and scalable CompactPCI Serial fabric solution using standard CompactPCI Serial components. The MXC948 enables multiple CPUs in the backplane to communicate and share IO devices.

CompactPCI Serial solutions can now easily scale out over external PCIe copper or fiber cables to similar cPCI-S chassis, PXIe chassis, standard PCIe servers and IO devices and expansion units. By loading the appropriate firmware, the MXC948 supports both transparent and non transparent bridging (NTB) use cases for clustering and I/O expansion applications. More information on eXpressWare.

PCI Express Gen 4.0

The MXC948 switch is designed for PCIe Gen 4.0 link speeds in the backplane and via the front panel PCIe cable port. It will auto negotiate to the highest speed supported (PCIe Gen4 - Gen1) by each component connected to individual port. This allows you to mix various generation of equipment without scarifying performance between high speed components.

Backplane support

The MXC948 follows the pinout defined in PICMG® CPCI-S.0 R2.0 for PCIe for the standard 40 lanes, using Amphenol Airmax VS connectors. USB and SATA pins on P3 are used for additional 8 PCIe lanes for a total of 48 lanes. This allows for up to 6 x8 links, or 4 x8 + 4 x4 links. Please use the MXC960 product if you are looking for a PICMG® CPCI-S.0 R2.0 compliant CompactPCI Switch. Please contact Dolphin for more information on PCIe clocking and configuration options.

PCIe Cable ports

The MXC948 switch has a quad SFF-8644 PCIe cable connectors to allow connectivity to external PCIe devices and servers. Each quad port can be used as four independent x4 links, two independent x8 links or one x16 link. Each SFF-8644 connector has a protected 3.3V supply to support up to four Optica Fiber Cables (AOCs). The MXC948 is carefully designed for maximum copper cable lengths. Fiber optics extends this distance to 100 meters. More info on cable alternatives for the MXC948 switch.

M.2

Onboard x4 Gen4 PCIe NVME support for 2280 Key M M.2. The M.2 connector follows the pinout defined in PCI Express M.2 Specification Revision 4.0 in table 3-25, Socket 3 PCIe-based Adapter Pinouts (Key M). Maximum allowed form factor is 2280.

The NVMe can be assigned to one of the connected CPU modules and shared with other CPU modules across the PCIe network using eXpressWare.

PCIe IO Expansion

Several CompactPCI Serial systems can be interconnected to multi rack CompactPCI Serial system using direct PCIe and Ethernet cables. The MXC948 switch used in combination with the MXH932 will support standard IO expansion, connecting a CompactPCI Serial rack to external PCIe Devices or PCIe Expansion chassis. The MXP924 and MXP908 / MXP909 enables connectivity between CompactPCI Serial and PXIe chassis. The MXS924 1 U Rack mount switch enables scale out to larger PCIe networks.

PCIe Clustering / Networking

The MXC948 can be used to connect several CPU boards inside a single CompactPCI Serial rack or several CompactPCI Serial racks can be interconnected to allow CPU to CPU and IO Sharing between racks. The MXC948 can also be used in combination with the MXH930 PCIe Host Adapters to establish connectivity to standard servers.

The MXC948 supports Dolphin’s extensive PCI Express Software libraries to create a powerful and reliable communication solution for applications that benefit from an ultra-low latency, high performance cluster interconnect. Dolphin’s PCI Express Software enables standard and embedded Linux, Windows, RTX and VxWorks network applications to benefit from PCI Express performance without modification. This comprehensive solution is ideal for real-time, technical and high performance computing, cloud computing, and enterprise business applications.

Reflective Memory

The MXC948 supports large reflective memory configurations and multiple multicast groups. Multicast can be utilized between CPU boards and IO devices in the chassis as well as to external equipment via the PCIe cable port.

Ethernet Switch

The MXC948 comes with an onboard Gigabit Ethernet switch. The switch has two RJ45 connectors on the front panel and 8 ports to the CompactPCI Serial backplane. The Ethenet switch only supports 1 GigE at the front panel.