USING THE EXTENDED PORT AWARENESS FEATURE OF THE TNETX4090 THUNDERSWITCH

This document describes how the extended port awareness feature of the Texas Instruments (TI™) ThunderSWITCH™ TNETX4090 enables system vendors to design a high port density system.

The TNETX4090 gigabit port (port 08) can be configured to support extended port awareness. This feature allows the TNETX4090 to comprehend a proprietary in-band-pre-tagging scheme, which replaces the preamble and start of frame (SOF) delimiter. The pre-tag contains, among other information, the forwarding decision to an extended port, which could be comprehended by a crossbar matrix switch. By designing a relatively simple and cheap crossbar matrix switch, a non-blocking, high port density system is achievable.

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