Introduction

The SparX-5 Enterprise Ethernet switch family provides a rich set of Enterprise switching features such as

advanced TCAM-based VLAN and QoS processing enabling delivery of differentiated services, and security

through TCAM-based frame processing using versatile content aware processor (VCAP). IPv4/IPv6 Layer 3 (L3)

unicast and multicast routing is supported with up to 18K IPv4/9K IPv6 unicast LPM entries and up to 9K IPv4/3K

IPv6 (S,G) multicast groups. L3 security features include source guard and reverse path forwarding (uRPF) tasks.

Additional L3 features include VRF-Lite and IP tunnels (IP over GRE/IP).

The SparX-5 switch family features a highly flexible set of Ethernet ports with support for 10G aggregation links,

QSGMII, USGMII, and USXGMII.

The device integrates a powerful 1 GHz dual-core ARM®

Cortex®

-A53 CPU enabling full management of the

switch and advanced Enterprise applications.

The SparX-5 switch family targets managed Layer 2 and Layer 3 equipment in SMB, SME, and Enterprise where

high port count 1G/2.5G/5G/10G switching with 10G aggregation links is required.

The SparX-5 switch family consists of following SKUs.

VSC7546 SparX-5-64 supports up to 64 Gbps of bandwidth with the following primary port configurations.

• 6 ×10G

• 16 × 2.5G + 2 × 10G

• 24 × 1G + 4 × 10G

VSC7549 SparX-5-90 supports up to 90 Gbps of bandwidth with the following primary port configurations.

• 9 × 10G

• 16 × 2.5G + 4 × 10G

• 48 × 1G + 4 × 10G

In addition, the device supports one 10/100/1000/2500/5000 Mbps SGMII/SerDes node processor interface

(NPI) Ethernet port.

Features

This section lists the key device features and benefits.

• Layer 2 and Layer 3 Forwarding

– IEEE®

802.1Q switch with 4K VLANs and 32K MAC table entries

– Push/pop/translate up to three VLAN tags on ingress and egress

– RSTP and MSTP support

– Fully nonblocking wire-speed switching performance for all frame sizes

– Link aggregation and DRNI per IEEE 802.1AX

– External bridge port extender role per IEEE 802.1BR

– IPv4/IPv6 unicast and multicast Layer 2 switching with up to 32K groups and 2K port masks

– IPv4/IPv6 unicast and multicast Layer 3 forwarding (routing) with reverse path forwarding (RPF) support

– IGMPv2, IGMPv3, MLDv1, and MLDv2 support

– IPv4 tunnels including GRE, 6to4, 6rd, 6over4, ISATAP, and 6in4

– Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) (IEEE 802.3az)

• Quality of Service

– Four megabytes of integrated shared packet memory

– Two megabytes of integrated shared packet memory

– Eight QoS classes with a pool of up to 32K queues

– TCAM-based classification with pattern matching against Layer 2 through Layer 4 information

– Dual-rate policers selected by VCAP IS2, eight dual-rate priority policers per port, and four single-rate

port policers for each port

– Flexible 4K ingress QoS mappings and 8K egress QoS mappings for VLAN tags and DSCP values

– 4K egress VLAN tag operations

– Low latency cut-through forwarding mode

– Priority-based flow control (PFC) (IEEE 802.1Qbb)

• Security

– Versatile content aware processor (VCAP™) packet filtering engine using ACLs for ingress and egress

packet inspection with four ingress lookups per frame and two egress lookups per egress frame copy

– Hierarchical VLAN ACLs and router ACLs

– Storm controllers for flooded broadcast, flooded multicast, and flooded unicast traffic

– Per-port, per-address registration for copying/redirecting/discarding

– 64 single-rate policers for ingress ACLs

– 64 single-rate policers for egress ACLs

• Management

– VCore-IV™ CPU system with integrated dual-core 1 GHz ARM Cortex-A53 CPU with MMU and DDR3/DDR4

SDRAM controller

– Integrated ARM Cortex-M3 CPU core for dedicated PCIe bootup and POE management.

– PCIe 1.x/2.0/3.0 CPU interface

– CPU frame extraction (eight queues) and injection (two queues) through DMA, which enables efficient

data transfer between Ethernet ports and CPU/PCIe

– JTAG CPU debug interface

– Configurable 32-bit data plus 8-bit ECC-capable DDR3/DDR4 SDRAM interface supporting up to eight

gigabytes (GB) of memory

– eMMC flash interface

– Sixty-four pin-shared general-purpose I/Os:

• Serial GPIO and two LED controllers controlling up to 32 ports with four LEDs each

• Triple PHY management controller (MIIM)

• Dual UART

• Dual built-in two wire serial interface multiplexer

• External interrupts

• SFP loss of signal inputs

– External access to registers through PCIe, SPI, MIIM, or through an Ethernet port with inline versatile

register access protocol (VRAP)

– Per-port counter set with support for the RMON statistics group (RFC 2819) and SNMP interfaces group

(RFC 2863)

– Support for CPU modes with internal CPU only, external CPU only, or dual CPU

• Applications

– Enterprise L2 managed and L2/L3 (L3-Lite) managed

– Enterprise edge

– WiFi aggregation

– High-end SMB/net café

– Embedded and control plane switches

– Security appliances

– Base stations and baseband processor interconnect

– Service provider CPEs