A Look Inside

It's time now to strip the switch down to reveal the components hidden inside its metallic casing.


The dismantling process went smoothly, and you can see the GSS116E's main components in the photo above.


A pretty large heatsink cools the Broadcom BCM53333A0KFSBG SoC (System on Chip) with up to 16 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports and includes a 125 MHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor.


Eight LG2P109N transformers are used. Each transformer supports up to two Ethernet ports, and their job is to provide isolation, all while acting as a common noise filter. These transformers are essential according to the respective IEEE specification (IEEE 802.1AX-2008) because devices connected to the switch might have a different ground offset.


The above ICs most likely are shift registers used to control the switch's LED indicators.


On the main PCB are, among others, a Texas Instruments SN74LVC125A bus buffer gate, a Matronix MX25L3206E serial flash, and a Texas Instrument TPS53318 buck converter.


The PSU that powers this switch is quite small and is installed on a dedicated PCB. We were very pleased to see that it is equipped with a pretty large MOV that will protect the circuits from spikes from the mains network.


The PSU carries a CE marking, so its electromagnetic emissions, either conducted or radiated, should be low enough.


The reservoir cap on the primary side is by Samxon, which makes products of decent quality, while there is a single switching fet with model number SIF4N60. We would like to see higher quality filtering caps on the secondary side instead of the Jamicon ones that are used. Jamicon caps cannot be considered of low quality, but they aren't top-notch either, and the caps in the secondary side are put under more stress. As you can see in the last of the above photos, a plain diode handles regulation in the secondary side since this PSU's capacity is very low, so there is no need for an SBR or fet.