As one of the most widely used network equipment, Ethernet switch occupies a more and more important position in data communication, and its development is of great significance to manufacturing industry and communication industry.

Ethernet switch, from the earliest layer-2 switch to the current three-layer switch and multi service switch, has more and more functions; the roles of the switch is more and more, covering router, firewall, wireless AC, etc.

Next, ETU-Link will introduce the related categories of Ethernet switches and their functional applications. From the use of forwarding chip, switches are divided into ASIC switches and programmable switches. ASIC switches have the advantages of high performance and low delay, while programmable switches have the advantages of flexible function expansion and short development cycle.

From the perspective of application scenarios, all communication manufacturers, including Cisco, H3C and Huawei, generally divide switches into Park switches and data center switches. The forwarding performance of campus switches is relatively low, providing rich port forms and rich user access management functions.

In addition to providing higher forwarding performance, data center switches also use a series of technologies to provide users with flow control functions (PFC, QCN) and network virtualization in cloud computing environment. At present, the optical modules matched with cloud servers and data center switches are mainly 10G, 25G, 40G and 100G optical modules. The optical modules provided by ETU-Link are compatible with Cisco, H3C and Huawei brand equipment. Compared with the original optical modules, the performance price ratio of ETU-Link’s module is much higher, which is a cost-effective optical module solution.

In the information age, the explosive growth of data puts forward higher and higher requirements for the traffic carried by network equipment. The enhancement of carrying capacity of network equipment is mainly reflected in two aspects: one is the increase of single port rate of equipment; the other is the increase of data processing performance of equipment.

In terms of single port rate, it has developed from 10Mb/s and 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s later. Now there are 40Gb/s and 100Gb/s ports. At the end of 2017, the IEEE802.3 Ethernet Working Group officially approved the new 802.3bs Ethernet standards including 200Gb/s and 400Gb/s. On the one hand, the increase of port speed improves the traffic of single port, on the other hand, it also simplifies the network deployment.

The data processing capacity of switches is generally measured by two indicators: switching capacity and packet forwarding rate. At present, the switch processing capacity of Huawei and H3C has exceeded 1000Tb/s and 200000Mpps. Chip manufacturing process and switching architecture have a significant impact on the data processing capability of switches. Using the current fin FET technology, the technology can reach the limit of 7Nm in theory. The more advanced the process is, the higher the performance of the chip per unit area is and the lower the power consumption is. In addition to the influence of manufacturing process, the engineering design of switch also affects the ability of data processing. At present, the frame switches of various switch manufacturers basically adopt the CLOS architecture. Under the CLOS architecture, whether to use VOQ to provide flow control mechanism and whether to use dynamic routing for forwarding between switching units at all levels will have an impact on the switch performance.

With the improvement of manufacturing technology and equipment design level, the port speed and processing capacity of the switch will be continuously improved. The improvement of switch port speed will certainly drive the development of optical module industry. As a professional manufacturer of optical module, ETU-Link will continuously introduce higher speed optical module to meet the market demand.