Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
System Packet Interface
Summary
The System Packet Interface (SPI) family of Interoperability Agreements from the Optical Internetworking Forum specify chip-to-chip, channelized, packet interfaces commonly used in synchronous optical networking and Ethernet applications. A typical application of such a packet level interface is between a framer (for optical network) or a MAC (for IP network) and a network processor. Another application of this interface might be between a packet processor ASIC and a traffic manager device.
There are two broad categories of chip-to-chip interfaces. The first, exemplified by PCI-Express and HyperTransport, supports reads and writes of memory addresses. The second broad category carries user packets over 1 or more channels and is exemplified by the IEEE 802.3 family of Media Independent Interfaces and the Optical Internetworking Forum family of System Packet Interfaces. Of these last two, the family of System Packet Interfaces is optimized to carry user packets from many channels. The family of System Packet Interfaces is the most important packet-oriented, chip-to-chip interface family used between devices in the Packet over SONET and Optical Transport Network, which are the principal protocols used to carry the internet between cities.
The agreements are:
SPI-3 – Packet Interface for Physical and Link Layers for OC-48 (2.488 Gbit/s)
SPI-4.1 – System Physical Interface Level 4 (SPI-4) Phase 1: A System Interface for Interconnection Between Physical and Link Layer, or Peer-to-Peer Entities Operating at an OC-192 Rate (10 Gbit/s).
SPI-4.2 – System Packet Interface Level 4 (SPI-4) Phase 2: OC-192 System Interface for Physical and Link Layer Devices.
SPI-5 – Packet Interface for Physical and Link Layers for OC-768 (40 Gbit/s)
SPI-S – Scalable System Packet Interface - useful for interfaces starting with OC-48 and scaling into the Terabit range
These agreements grew out of the donation to the OIF by PMC-Sierra of the POS-PHY interface definitions PL-3 and PL-4, which themselves came from the ATM Forum's Utopia definitions.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.