The latest chip is targeted at enterprise switch and router vendors, and offers 24 Ethernet port density with advanced classification for oversubscription with guaranteed Quality of Service.

Barcelona uses deep buffers and flexible scheduling to enable increased port counts on switches.

“Typically, switch vendors have had to compromise between service quality and cost-effective oversubscription”, said Zino Chair, Cortina’s vice president of marketing. “The Barcelona IC bridges that gap. Oversubscription can be used to more than double Ethernet port densities.”

Chair says the device can identify and prioritise major flaws even in a congested network, and mark them as high priority with guaranteed bandwidth while storing bulk traffic to prevent packet loss.

The chip connects directly to Gigabit Ethernet optical modules or serially to copper PHYs, and interfaces with existing packet processors through the industry standard SPI port.

Cortina (Sunnyvale, Calif.) introduced last month a multiservice framer and media-access control device as part of a range that will simplify applications for aggregated Sonet, time-division multiplexing, Ethernet and asynchronous-transfer-mode services.

Dubbed the Arsenal, this followed hot on the heels of the Madrid, a bridging chip to handle subchannels of resilient packet ring (RPR).