Architecture Overview

In keeping with Excel’s commitment to open, programmable services, the DSP Series 2 delivers the following key architectural advantages:

• Modular Design

• Scalability

• High Performance and Reliability

Modular Design

The DSP Series 2 takes advantage of Excel’s commitment to technology re-use by utilizing the motherboard from our IP Network Interface Series 2 card, based on Motorola Power QUICC 8260 technology with 128 MB of SDRAM.

The DSP supports on-board Ethernet switch, with eight internal and three external ports. External ports can be aggregated supporting up to three 100 mbps streams.

The system supports up to two modules per board; each module includes four DSPs. Each DSP supports up to four separate functions, two for transmit and two for receive, and each stream supports up to 256 DS0s.

The product is supported by a variety of message and query statistics, including cache statistics and function usage statistics, so that developers and service providers can monitor their services and optimize their DSP configurations.

Scalability

The DSP Series 2 card is offered in two configurations:

• One module, with 2048 resource points total

• Two modules, with 4096 resource points total

Additional resource points can be licensed on a per system basis in 2048 resource point increments. Excel offers a configuration tool for developers and service providers to analyze your specific operating environments in order to configure the appropriate amount of resources.

The NFS service is optional and is licensed separately.

High Performance and Reliability

The DSP Series 2 card is supported by a pooling scheme for dynamic resource allocation. Resource points are allocated only when they are used. This provides flexibility in the way that resources are allocated at any given point in time, and results in better utilization of resources and improved performance.

To achieve high reliability, the DSP Series 2 card supports card-level hardware redundancy coupled with dynamic resource allocation. If one DSP Series 2 card fails, the system CPU will remove the resource points that are included in the base modules from the resource pool, but will reallocate licensed capacities to the remaining in-service hardware in order to preserve the maximum resources possible.

Every port in the Excel platform has direct access to every DSP resource (except for channels in Gateway Mode. See the Developer’s Guide: IP for more information on Gateway Mode). A bi-directional PCM bus allows simultaneous incoming and outgoing operations, such as tone reception and tone generation.

You can upgrade your system with additional DSP cards as your needs grow, and multiple cards can load-share. The DSP cards are hot-swappable, which simplifies maintenance and upgrades, and increases overall reliability.