A manufacturer of passenger aircraft in-flight entertainment and internet connectivity systems was building an Ethernet switch to manage traffic between the main controller and the in-seat computers. The system had to be compact and rugged. Thus the company’s product design consisted of a rugged enclosure with MIL-TDL-38999 style connectors mounted on a PCB. They were seeking a solution where they could plug the Ethernet switch directly onto their connector board to eliminate internal cables and improve ruggedness and reliability and make the system as compact as possible. As this solution called for a custom design, the customer was also seeking to minimize the cost of the custom engineering effort.
Diamond Systems was able to deliver a perfect-fit solution for this project. In order to reduce development time and cost for a custom product, we used an EPSILON Ethernet switch module as the core of the system. These switch modules provide an almost complete Ethernet switch in a rugged, compact module measuring only 84 x 55 mm (3.3 x 2.2 inches). The core switching circuit, control processor, and embedded software are built into the board, and only the “final inch” of connectors and magnetics is needed to complete the design. By using a switch module, a custom Ethernet switch design can be implemented quickly and easily, since 90% of the effort is already complete and available as an off-the-shelf component, and only the relatively easy portion of the effort remains to be done. Diamond designed the custom carrier board that connected the Epsilon switch module to the customer's electronics, which included board-mounted 38999 style rugged connectors. It was designed to be as small as possible; the final size matches the width of the switch module and extends in one direction to add the SFP+ sockets, for a total size of only 55 x 136mm (2.2 x 5.3”). Thus a compact 3-layer “sandwich” of boards was created to implement the complete system.
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