Updates to address the reliability of GigaStax Rugged

Why GigaStax Rugged?

GigaStax Rugged has long been a favourite for customers who need compact switching in a rugged form factor. One of the benefits of GigaStax Rugged is the integration of everything into the module; Ethernet circuitry, magnetics and firmware.

It stands in contrast to UbiSwitch which, while being more capable, still requires the transformers to be added to the customer's system, which can be a barrier to integration.

What's the issue?

However we have seen occasional issues with the reliability of this device. Specifically we have noticed that GigaStax Rugged will not form a stable connection with a connected device if said connected device is using an older ethernet transceiver chip. We've also seen unreliable data transmission and link drops when interconnecting two GigaStax Rugged boards together via an ethernet port on each.

This particular issue is rare, but very difficult to reproduce and thus has presented a real challenge to us since inception of this board.

How did we solve it?

After spending significant time on this issue, we have figured out that the issue can be solved with edits to our firmware that improves the parameters of the ethernet ports inside the device. We also made hardware changes to further improve performance.

Now (as of August 2024), all our boards ship with firmware preloaded to solve this issue. We've also implemented an easy way for our customers to check whether their board is running the latest firmware. At power on, the five port LEDs will flash in sequence, followed by the firmware revision number being represented in binary on the five port LEDs.

Conclusion 

We take reliability of our hardware seriously, and we're really happy to have finally solved this bug. Our customers expect our systems to work reliability in harsh environments, and we can only do that with our deep technical expertise in embedded ethernet.

If you are encountering an issue on GigaStax Rugged and one of your connected devices, please get in touch.