Broadcom Unveils New Dual Port 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Broadcom Corporation, a global provider of semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, has announced the release of new dual port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) physical layer (PHY) transceiver that supports IEEE (News - Alert) 802.3 10GBASE-T operation.

 

The company has designed the new dual port 10GBASE-T PHY to suit the high-density switch and server requirement and helps to drive the adoption of 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) twisted pair connectivity in data centers and enterprise networks. It also supports auto-negotiation between 10 Gbps and legacy Ethernet speeds, enabling compatibility with the installed base of Ethernet technology.

 

The built in configuration in the dual port helps in reducing the number of devices required in a design, uses less board space and provides better airflow than competing solutions that must stack multiple chips to achieve similar functionality.

 

Kevin Brown, senior director and general manager of Broadcom's (News - Alert) PHY line of business, said that, the demand for high-density switches and servers with 10GBASE-T connectivity is growing, and company’s new dual PHY addresses the space constraints common in switch and server designs with a low power, high performance solution.

 

"Broadcom continues to lead the Ethernet PHY market. Our new dual port 10GBASE-T PHY consumes less than six watts per port at the full 100 meter distance with 100 percent 10 Gbps traffic and rounds out our industry leading 10GbE portfolio of physical layer chips for twisted pair, fiber, backplanes, and direct-attach copper solutions, complementing our 10GbE controllers and switch silicon, for complete end-to-end solutions," said Brown.

 

10GBASE-T PHY provides customers and IT managers with a solution that meets 10G bandwidth connectivity requirements while maintaining complete backward compatibility and interoperability with existing customer products that already use Gigabit Ethernet or Fast Ethernet connectivity, according to the company.

A recent report from the Dell' (News - Alert)Oro Group indicates that 10 Gigabit (10G) copper connections will potentially reach 6.8 million ports by 2013, a 5-year compounded annual growth rate of more than 100 percent.

 

This growth is fueled in part by increases in server input/output (I/O) speed and storage I/O speed, as well as the additional throughput needed for the aggregation of 1 Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE) links.

 

To address the current requirement, Broadcom has announced that its BCM84812 10GBASE-T transceiver now supports two 10GbE ports and provides a complete PHY solution operating at less than six watts of power per port while operating over 100 meters of Category 6A unshielded twisted pair (UTP) or Category 7 cables.