Industrial Ethernet Switch

Overview

An industrial Ethernet switch does the same forwarding job as an office switch, but it has to survive a factory floor, a trackside cabinet, or an electrical substation: wide temperature swings, vibration, dust, and the electrical surges that come with heavy machinery nearby. It is fanless to avoid a moving part that would clog or fail, mounts on a DIN rail beside the PLCs and drives it serves, and takes redundant DC power so a single feed failure does not bring the network segment down. Ring-redundancy protocols let it recover from a broken link in milliseconds, which matters when the traffic is real-time control rather than email.

How it works

Field cabling lands on the Port Module. Each copper port uses a metal-shelled Shielded RJ45 Jack and an extended-temperature Ethernet Magnetics module for isolation, driven by an Ethernet PHY, while the SFP Cage slots accept fiber transceivers for long runs immune to ground-potential differences. Frames reach the Switch Mainboard, where the Compute SoC Module switch fabric forwards them and the Microcontroller handles management, ring protocols, and the alarm logic. Every line is guarded by an Surge Protector network that clamps the transients which would otherwise destroy the PHYs.

Power comes in on the Power Input Stage stage: two DC feeds are combined through ORing Diode ORing devices so either can fail without interrupting the rails, and an Alarm Relay changes state on a fault to signal a control room. Field wiring is landed on the pluggable Terminal Block.

Because the boards run in humid, dusty, sometimes corrosive air, they are sealed with Conformal Coating and housed in the finned DIN-Rail Housing, which sheds heat by convection alone. The Front Panel Indicators reports power, alarm, and per-port link state.