Architectural Design Study for a 10Gb/s Ethernet Switch

The demand for 10Gb/s switches at this early stage in the market is primarily for modular solutions that can grow as do the bandwidth requirements. This indicates a requirement for chassis based solutions where individual line cards can be added to a chassis infrastructure and have to communicate across a 10Gb/s switching backplane. The present study is provides an architectural design solution for a passive copper backplane used for moving data between the line cards of a 10Gb/s Ethernet switch system. The ability to pass multi-gigabit data rates through a backplane system requires great attention to details previously thought to be irrelevant at lower frequencies. The trace dimensions, the via holes diameters, the backplane materials and choice of connectors, all play a crucial role in determining the success of the system. At high-speed even a subtle change in any of these elements can drastically affect the end-to-end system performance. In this context, the study presents the modeling and simulation work that has been done and it proposes a suitable backplane design for achieving error-free transmission at 10Gb/s rates.