Interconnect Jetson Orin Nano/NX Modules over USB 3.2
Hi everyone ????
We want to interconnect several (at least 4) Orin Nano/NX modules to form a small cluster of compute nodes. The conventional way is to use an Ethernet switch and connect all modules to it. However, Jetson modules only support 1GbE which isn’t enough for what we want to build. We’d like to utilize all three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, each supporting 10Gb/s (in host mode) and 5Gb/s (in device mode) according to the Interface Comparison and Migration Note (USB 3.2 Mapping Options). We had a look at Figure 1.1 in the Orin Technical Reference Manual (page 5583) and it looks like only one USB 3.2 connection can be in device mode at any given time.
1) Is it possible to dynamically change which connection is in device/host mode, i.e. first USBSS0, then USBSS2, etc.?
2) Could you provide a sample PCB schematic, similar to Figure 7-1 and Figure 7-2 of the Product Design Guide (page 29), but illustrating how to implement a dynamic device/host connection instead?
3) Can we perhaps bypass the USB protocol entirely, utilize the UPHY lanes directly and write custom drivers for the cross-module communication?