40nm PHY supports Ethernet, Fibre Channel

Broadcom Corp. has released 40nm quad-channel 1010GbE PHY devices that provide ultralow power consumption and savings of approximately 30 percent over competing 65nm CMOS solutions. The BCM84750 series enables the convergence of 10GbE and Fibre Channel equipment in the data center supporting unified networking and storage applications, as well as high density, high bandwidth server applications, scaled to support 40-and 100GbE designs in the future.

Utilizing Broadcom's digital signal processing (DSP) technology, the BCM84750 series of quad all-DSP 10GbE PHYs enable IT professionals to preserve their existing fiber infrastructures by providing a low cost upgrade path from 1Gbit Ethernet to 10Gbit Ethernet and beyond, up to 40Gbit Ethernet. This high-speed DSP technology, coupled with the 40nm design, provides significant performance, manufacturing and reliability advantages over competing analog solutions and will help drive the transition to 10Gbit Ethernet by leveraging the cost effective SFP+ standard.

Broadcom is addresses the needs of the high density SFP+ market with its new BCM84750 series quad-channel 10GbE SFI-to-XFI PHY solutions. The new transceivers exceed the requirements of the IEEE 802.3aq standard, which was developed to provide a low cost 10x speed upgrade for existing Gigabit Ethernet links in multi-mode fiber applications.

The BCM84750 series of quad 10GbE SFI-to-XFI PHYs build upon seven generations of 10GbE serial PHY technology and implements Broadcom's electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) equalizer technology.

EDC extends the transmission distance significantly by maintaining the integrity and quality of the signal and improves networking efficiency, enabling a seamless, cost effective upgrade to existing enterprise and metro service transport networks.

The BCM84750 series features support for 8/4/2G Fibre Channel, enabling unified data center switches that can support 10GbE, Fibre Channel over Ethernet or native Fibre Channel on each port.

The BCM84750 series of quad-channel 10GbE SFI-to-XFI PHYs is sampling to early access customers and includes the BCM84753 and BCM84754.

"Our new 40nm 10GbE PHY offerings leverage our existing DSP architecture to deliver superior performance and scalability for data center applications, and with ultra low power consumption, addresses the power and cooling issues that face today's data center operators. IT professionals can scale their capacity while preserving their existing fiber infrastructure by upgrading from 1GbE to 10GbE and beyond to 40GbE," said Lorenzo Longo, VP and general manager, Broadcom's high-speed interconnect products line.

In addition, the BCM84750 supports backplane, twisted-pair and optical front panel applications. This product portfolio also includes support for all 10G PHY standards including 10GBASE-T, 10GBASE-KR, 10GBASE-LRM, 10GBASE-SR/LR and 10GBASE-ER/ZR.