“The continuing adoption of Ethernet in the digital home for both content delivery and interconnection of media devices is driving the demand for higher port count devices,” noted Wiren Perera, Micrel’s director of Ethernet Products. “Micrel’s new switch family directly addresses these needs coupled with energy efficiency enabling compliance to important green standards such as ENERGY STAR. The flexible configurability of the family allows the requirements of a variety of applications to be satisfied based on a single foundation system platform.”
Sophisticated QoS features such as tag and port-based VLAN support and IPv6 priority classification make these devices ideal for today’s most demanding IP content based applications in the digital home; IPTV, IP-STB (set top box), VoIP (voice over IP), residential gateways and GPON. The low emissions and Micrel’s signature high reliability and quality also make these devices suitable for connectivity applications in the fast growing industrial automation and automotive markets.
The devices support a single 3.3V power supply with an internal 1.2V LDO, with options for 3.3V, 2.5V or 1.8V IO voltages. Further power savings are supported by advanced power management, including the device’s “Energy Detect Power Down” mode. This mode is activated when the cable is unplugged, and the “slow oscillator” mode is activated when the device is not in use.
The product family provides flexible host processor and PHY interfacing via MII or RMII. Flexibility is also provided in terms of copper or fiber media interfaces. On-chip termination, and internal generation of the 50MHz RMII clock further reduces bill of materials cost and enables a small package size (64-pin QFN for KSZ8864RMN).