Reference Design

Monaco

The Monaco platform is the first 10GbE OEM switch to offer lossless fabric switching, allowing Ethernet switch manufacturers to deliver Ethernet throughout the data center that can carry storage, clustering and networking traffic.

Source: Fulcrum Microsystems
11/17/2008

"Monaco" is an efficient 24-port SFP+ reference design for the FocalPoint 10G Ethernet switch family and can be used to rapidly and exhaustively evaluate the performance and flexibility of the FM4224, either in a test environment or a live data center network.

The Monaco reference design contains a Freescale 8543 control processor which can be used to program the platform for a variety of configurations, and provide health and activity information as requested. The platform also contains Fulcrum’s TestPoint™ software, which operates on Linux 2.6 embedded operating system. The optional system software includes Fulcrum's ControlPoint™ Software Suite, which contains embedded Linux OS, test and configuration tools, and NextHop UNS switching and routing software.

Monaco also includes an Altera EP3C80F484C Cyclone-III series FPGA between the FM4224 and the Freescale processor, which can be used to off-load CPU tasks such as DMA or add proprietary features such as advanced congestion management or load balancing. A basic DMA FPGA configuration is provided with the platform.