Rugged Ethernet Switch Family
06 October 2008
On the occasion of the InnoTrans railway show in Berlin, MEN Mikro Elektronik introduces a new product family of rugged Ethernet switches. Designed for harsh environments that meet the EN 50155 railway standard – an operation temperature from -40°C to +85°C – this line of products includes both managed and unmanaged eight-port fast Ethernet switches. The product range comprises of stand-alone or 19in rack mountable versions (SF1 through SF4), with three available types of front connectors (RJ45, M12, D-Sub) for a broad palette of applications.
An easily customizable, open low-power platform
All switches support full-duplex and half-duplex operation, high-speed non-blocking, store-and-forward switching and autonegotiation, as well as layer-two switching. They are fault tolerant and are able to restore themselves on their own. For example, if a link is temporarily unavailable, it will work again after the disturbance without any restart or reset. Their built-in test mechanisms make these rugged Ethernet switches even more reliable components in the communication system. The switches consume less than 7W and are installed in a fanless housing.
The rugged Ethernet switches were specifically designed for mobile communication systems. Therefore, they are fully compliant with the EN 50155 railway standard and feature a wide-range power supply (14V to 154V). All components are specified for a -40°C to +85°C operation temperature. There are no socketed components, hardening the product against shock and vibration. The PCBs are ready for coating and every switch has a guaranteed minimum standard availability of five years.
Managed or unmanaged models for diverse applications
The managed stand-alone models, SF2 and SF3, include their own FPGA-based low-power CPU that integrates the management firmware (the source code is available for development of individual management functions). In addition, they also support power over Ethernet (PoE) on ports 0 and 1 and can act as a power source equipment (PSE) or powered device (PD). A service interface is accessible at the front panel, providing an easy way to configure the switch using an SMB interface on a standard D-Sub connector.
All of the ports are individually configurable. Using a hardware key, a Telnet command line interface or SNMP (version three) makes maintenance very easy, for instance, when the switch is used on board a vehicle or in automation applications.
For the unmanaged switch models, SF1 and SF4, MEN also provides fixed managed versions with a configuration EEPROM tailored to the application’s requirements. This may include features such as 802.1p priority, port-based priority, port-based VLAN or IEEE 802.1q VLAN IDs.
