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Certifiable Switch for High Availability and Safety Requirements from TTTech
[January 21, 2014]

Certifiable Switch for High Availability and Safety Requirements from TTTech


VIENNA, Austria --(Business Wire)--

TTTech, the leading supplier of dependable networking solutions based on time-triggered technology and modular safety platforms, has developed a certifiable 24 port switch for real-time Ethernet communication. The switch is designed for mission-critical and safety-critical real-time applications. It has built-in mechanisms for traffic policing and fault isolation and is developed according to IEC (News - Alert) 61508 SIL 2 standards. The switching function provides fully deterministic data transfer while performing packet processing on all 24 ports with maximum line speed. The switch is intended for use in industrial applications with high availability and fail-operational requirements.

This 24 port switch is part of a family of rugged and certified switches that supports several Ethernet standars, including IEEE (News - Alert) standards, such as AVB and TSN, rate-constrained mechanisms and the time-triggered SAE AS6802 standard for synchronous communication. The deterministic and fail-silent Ethernet switching engine supports synchronous communication with stringent design verification suitable for safety-critical operation and certifiable to IEC 61508.



Due to several aspects this switch marks a considerable technical innovation: It achieves reliability and fail-safe switching by implementing the entire switching functionality and management functions according to stringent development processes suitable for safety certification, and by using chip-level technologies for real-time self-diagnosis of the switching function. By doing that the switch transforms possible arbitrary failure modes in the fail-silent failure mode. This allows the building of fail-operational networks for mission-critical and safety-critical distributed applications with two channels, as each communication channel is fail-silent. Combined with the deterministic message processing capabilities, true partitioning and isolation of multiple critical traffic flows on the network are achieved.

The rugged 24 port TTEthernet switch model offers 18 ports with 100 Mbit/s and 6 ports with 1 Gbit/s. It contains a dual-core lock-step TMS570 MCU (Hercules™) from Texas Instruments (News - Alert) that executes a set of management functions developed and certified for safety-critical operation. The switch has a 19" form factor and customization is possible.



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