The G-RocX™ VSC7501, a complete 4 + 2-port GbE router-on-a-chip, integrates into a single device the features critical to GbE gateway products supporting Triple Play and other high-speed broadband services. To reduce chip count and associated BOM cost, the VSC7501 includes 4 triple speed copper PHY ports, line-side termination resistors, PLLs, a custom hardware-based network address translation (HNAT) engine, ARM926EJ™ CPU, voltage regulators, a UART, two USB 2.0 interfaces, and a PCI port.Each port enables advanced quality of service (QoS) classification through a highly configurable QoS control list, which can prioritize high-quality voice, video, and data applications to ensure low latency and jitter for sensitive real-time protocols.

CPU Offloading The G-RocX™ HNAT engine offloads burdensome CPU operations to enable full gigabit per second line rate routing. Operations such as packet header extraction, checksums, stateful packet inspection (SPI) firewall, ARP, and session table search are offloaded to on-chip hardware hooks. Specifically designed for IEEE 802.11n applications, this architecture accelerates the delivery of Ethernet and wireless packets simultaneously.

Proven SparX™ Technology The integrated GbE switch is based on Vitesse’s SparX series technology. SparX devices offer sophisticated QoS features, including four queues per port with per-queue traffic shaping and policing, IPv4 and IPv6 classification capabilities, and the ability to carry consumer-quality VoIP. Other features include IEEE 802.1X authentication, Layer 2 through Layer 4 link aggregation and VLAN support, and wire-speed MAC address learning. Of particular importance is the SparX series' ability to support Differentiated Service Code Point (DSCP) remarking, which enables enterprise network managers and service providers to ensure a consistent QoS classification throughout a network.