Rugged Ethernet Switch Family

Summary:
-40 to +85°C qualified
Fully EN 50155 (railway) compliant
8 Fast Ethernet ports via RJ45, M12 or D-Sub
Managed and unmanaged models
Power over Ethernet (managed models)
Wide-range power supply

Full Text:
On the occasion of the InnoTrans railway show in Berlin MEN Mikro Elektronik introduces a new product family of rugged Ethernet switches. Designed for harsh environments that meet the EN 50155 railway standard – e.g. an operation temperature from -40 to +85°C – this line of products includes both managed and unmanaged 8-port Fast Ethernet switches. The product range comprises stand-alone or 19” rack mountable versions (SF1 through SF4) with three available types of front connectors (RJ45, M12, D-Sub) for a broad palette of applications.

An easily customizable, open low-power platform
All switches support full-duplex and half-duplex operation, high-speed non-blocking, store-and-forward switching and autonegotiation as well as Layer-2 switching. They are fault tolerant and restore themselves on their own: if a link is temporarily unavailable, it will work again after the disturbance without any restart or reset. Their built-in test mechanisms make these rugged Ethernet switches even more reliable components in the communication system. The switches consume less than 7 W and are installed in a fanless housing.

The rugged Ethernet switches were specifically designed for mobile communication systems. They are thus for example fully compliant with the EN 50155 railway standard and feature a wide-range power supply (14 to 154 V). All components are specified for a -40 to +85°C operation temperature. There are no socketed components, hardening the product against shock and vibration. The PCBs are ready for coating and every switch has a guaranteed minimum standard availability of 5 years.

Managed or unmanaged models for diverse applications
The managed stand-alone models SF2 and SF3 include their own FPGA-based low-power CPU that integrates the management firmware (the source code is available for development of individual management functions). In addition, they also support Power over Ethernet (PoE) on ports 0 and 1 and can act as a Power Source Equipment (PSE) or Powered Device (PD). A service interface is accessible at the front panel, providing an easy way to configure the switch using an SMB interface on a standard D-Sub connector.

All of the ports are individually configurable. Using a hardware key, a Telnet command line interface or SNMP (Version 3) also makes maintenance very easy, for example when the switch is used on board a vehicle or in automation applications.

For the unmanaged switch models SF1 and SF4 MEN also provides fixed managed versions with a configuration EEPROM tailored to the application´s requirements. This may include features such as 802.1p priority and port-based priority, port-based VLAN or IEEE 802.1q VLAN IDs.

Contact:
Peter Albert
Head of Sales, Germany
MEN Mikro Elektronik GmbH
Neuwieder Straße 5-7
90411 Nuremberg, Germany
Phone +49-911-99 33 5-187
Fax +49-911-99 33 5-901
E-Mail Peter.Albert@men.de
www.men.de