Design And Implementation Of Forwarding Engine Of Line Card On Fibre Channel Switch

With the development of the technologies for T b/s computation and T b/s communication, it is necessary to propose the T b/s storage technology. In order to realize T b/s storage, Storage Area Network (SAN) is proposed on the base of Fiber Channel technology. SAN is an application-specific communication network, which is similar to the Ethernet in architecture and used to connect the storage devices with communication devices. Fiber Channel (FC) Switch is the core of the SAN. This paper introduces the Fiber Channel Protocol firstly. After that, the system-level architecture of a FC Switch with 8×8 1.0625Gb/s serial data rates is proposed. Next, the composing modules of line card on FC Switch are described. After introducing the basic concepts and architectures, the author focuses on the design and implementation by FPGA of forwarding engine on line card. Forwarding engine is the center of a line card, which has the interfaces with other components of a line card, such as MAC processing unit, controller of a line card and transceiver. As a result, forwarding engine places an important role in the communication of a line card. Look-up tables based on hardware, combined input and output queuing and unicast multi-queue mode are used for routing look-up, data buffering and data switching respectively. After that, the implementation by FPGA and the related timing simulation are introduced in details and the results of circuit-level testing for the forwarding engine are analysed aslo. It can be seen clearly that the forwarding engine can correctly realize the service of Class 3 at the serial rate of 1.0625Gb/s.