Design And Implementation Of The Line Card Controller On Fibre Channel Switch

With the development of technology and the increase of the information, the external storage facilities become more and more huge, the speed of data reading and writing becomes faster and faster. To meet these requirements, a new technology integrating the storage application and the network technology emerges-SAN. SAN is a network made up of storage facilities and system components. Since all the communication is completed in a Fibre Channel(FC)network, SAN can be used to collect and share the storage resources. FC protocol, a protocol proposed to make SAN a reality, provides full support to physical layer, transfer control and up levels, and can provide a transfer speed up to at least 1Gbps. All of these make SAN an amazing choice. FC switch is the core component in SAN. In this paper all the levels of the FC protocol are analysed firstly, and then a system-level architecture of the FC switch is promoted. The FC switch includes 8 ports, each port's data rate is 1.0625Gbps. After that, the function of the Line Card (LC) controller in the switch is analysed. The LC controller includes four function modules: initialization detect module; N port login module; error detect module; communicating with the controller of the switch card module. The flow charts of these modules are offered, the hardware platform of the LC controller is built and the appropriate operating system is chosen based on the function. The four function modules are realized in the operating system. Finally, the LC controller and the four function modules are tested. The result of testing indicates that the LC controller can work, four modules can realize their functions.