3com Corporation

3 Com Corporation

Craig Owens

Ruchi Wadhawan

David A Kranzler

John Griesing

Don Yih Wong

In a fibre channel network environment wherein an arbitrated loop is provided a switchable connection with another arbitrated loop, a technique and corresponding apparatus are provided for controlling signal paths through the hubs stack between any two devices such that routing of a signal and interactive communication can be carried out transparently to the fibre channel network without excessive overhead, and wherein control is changed in an orderly manner such that end-to-end device connections are unaware that they are not connected to the same hub. A switched arbitrated loop (SAL) according to the invention provides the concurrent bandwidth resource of a fabric switch without the extra features which would increase design cost and operational overhead. In a specific embodiment, a switched arbitrated loop supports only 126 nodes for stations (plus one fabric port) in a single loop topology. The invention provides the concurrent connections and high bandwidth capabilities of a conventional fabric switch, but at a cost close to that of a conventional hub while behaving such that devices connected to it are unaware that they are not on a normal loop when they are communicating.

Fibre channel switched arbitrated loop

A peripheral device for use with a computer. The peripheral device includes a data path, a control circuit coupled to the data path for controlling data communication and a port. The port includes a connector used by the data path. The connector includes a first set of pins that are used by the data path and a second set of pins that are not used by the data path. The first set of pins are coupled to the data path for data communication from the data path to the computer, and the second set of pins coupled to the control circuit for providing access to the control circuit from the port.

Device for out-of-band transmission on computer peripheral

A method and apparatus is provided allowing a dual-speed network adapter to connect to the same physical connector without the use of mechanical or electro-mechanical switches. On the transmit path, the invention uses a differential amplifier buffer (130) to selectively couple a high speed transmit paths to the network, with the differential amplifier connected to the same output impedance as one of the two driver circuits. On the receive path, the invention allows data to be received in parallel by two receiver circuits, with one circuit isolated from the other with a pair of very high input impedance emitter/followers (40, 50).

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Belmont, CA, United States of America

Craig Owens