A 100 Mb/s multi-LAN crosspoint chip set for cable management

Abstract

A multi-LAN, 0 dB insertion loss, analog crosspoint switch chip-set is described which forms the heart of a new LAN cable management product. The chip-set is capable of switching FDDI (TP-PMD), ethernet, token ring, and half-duplex protocols through a matrix of 108/spl times/108 differential cross-connects, for services using 100 m of unshielded twisted pair cabling and data rates of up to 100 Mb/s, using commercial CMOS and BiCMOS technologies. Using this chip set, it is possible to construct the largest 0 dB insertion-loss programmable analog crosspoint (108/spl times/108), operating at 100 Mb/s, currently available.