The use of multiple fabric technologies within industry-standard platforms extends the range of applications that can be addressed, but tends to fragment the market. Fulcrum is betting that by eliminating the latency issues with Ethernet switching, the vast ecosystem that surrounds Ethernet will drive much-needed consolidation.

Simon Stanley,
Light Reading's
Comm Chip Insider

FocalPoint Ethernet Switch and Router Chip Family

The FocalPoint family comprises a complete range of full-featured, high-performance
layer-2 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch chips and multi-layer (L2, L3, L4) 10-Gigabit Ethernet intelligent switch/router chips.

The FM2000 layer-2, and FM4000 multi-layer devices are available in a variety of port configurations with as many as 24 ports of full line rate switching and routing in a single, integrated device. Each FM2000 has a comparable, pin-compatible FM4000 device, enabling customers to offer a family of products with a range of features and price points, leveraging a single hardware design.

The devices in the FM2000 and FM4000 series include
(click on the device name for more information):

Notes:

• The ports identified as "10G XAUI, SGMII" can be independently configured to operate at 10G rate (XAUI or CX4), or at 10M, 100M, 1G, and 2.5G rates (using the SGMII standard).
• The ports identified as "SGMII" can be independently configured to operate at 10M, 100M, 1G, and 2.5G rates, using the SGMII standard.

FM2000 Series Layer-2 Switch

The single-chip FM2000 devices deliver a robust set of switching capabilities including VLAN support, spanning tree, security, link aggregation, management, statistics and more. With an unprecedented level of integration, the FM2000 devices offer the most compact, lowest latency, power-efficient and cost-effective layer-2 Ethernet switching solutions available, making 10-Gigabit Ethernet ready for broad deployment – today.

FM4000 Series IP v4/v6 Router

The FM4000 devices build on the FM2000’s best-in-class, high performance, low latency Ethernet switch architecture by adding a comprehensive suite of Layer 3/4 TCP/IP features and advanced security, congestion management and system management capabilities. These switches contain all the features necessary to enable Ethernet as the single, converged datacenter fabric, transporting inter-processor, storage and networking traffic. Traffic classification, class-based congestion management, and sophisticated traffic policing and queue management mechanisms allow multiple traffic types to be classified and effectively processed on a prioritized basis. Advanced tag switching, L2/3/4 access control lists and other security features, IPv4 and IPv6 unicast and multicast and in-band management capabilities -- all while preserving extremely low 300ns latency -- contribute to provide a resilient, highly-scalable datacenter switch platform.

FocalPoint Reference Designs

To assist in evaluation and to accelerate design-in, Fulcrum offers fully-functional reference designs.

Reno is a 24-port platform with 12 CX4 interfaces and 12 more that are optionally CX4, XFP or SFP+ interfaces. The Reno platform may be ordered with either the FM2224 or FM4224 chip inside, and is delivered with Fulcrum’s TestPoint test development software and ControlPoint software suite running on Linux ELDK. A complete platform hardware design kit is also available.

Vegas showcases the virtues of the FocalPoint FM2112 and FM4112 1G Ethernet switch chip, offering 48 1GBaseT ports, plus up to 8 CX4 10G Ethernet ports in a compact 1U rack-mountable chassis.