March 24, 2009 -- Broadcom Corp. has announced two new low-power, dual-10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) physical layer (PHY) devices that leverage Broadcom's field-proven digital signal processing (DSP) technology. According to Broadcom, these are the industry's first 65-nm CMOS all-DSP 10GbE serial transceivers. The Broadcom high-speed DSP technology provides significant performance, manufacturing and reliability advantages over analog solutions and will help drive the transition to 10GbE by leveraging the cost effective SFP+ standard.

Today's networking equipment, such as high-end routers, network aggregation switches, blade servers and top-of-rack data center switches, require increased densities to address next-generation bandwidth and throughput needs of the enterprise. Port counts can vary from 8 to 16 10GbE channels, to as many as 48 channels on next generation 10GbE blade server or enterprise chassis systems. To enable the introduction of these high-port-count systems, low-cost module solutions, such as SFP+ with support for both fiber and direct attached copper interfaces, are starting to ship in volume today.

Broadcom is well-positioned to address the needs of the high-density SFP+ market with its new BCM8727 dual 10GbE SFI-to-XAUI PHY and BCM8750 dual 10GbE SFI-to-XFI PHY solutions. Both solutions 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. By utilizing a PHY based entirely on DSP architecture, enterprise data centers can now achieve higher bandwidth and performance, while maintaining significant savings in cost, resources and manpower when upgrading to 10GbE links.

Some technical details

The Broadcom BCM8727 dual 10GbE SFI-to-XAUI PHY and the BCM8750 dual 10GbE SFI-to-XFI PHY build upon six generations of field-proven 10GbE serial PHY technology. Both implement Broadcom's electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) equalizer technology that uses an all-DSP design, resulting in maximum flexibility with the highest performance, exceeding the IEEE 10GBASE-LRM Pre, Post, and Split Symmetric Stressors and up to 15 meters of low-cost direct attached copper SFP+. An on-chip micro-controller provides additional flexibility to maintain optimal performance in even the most challenging operating conditions.

In support of the SFP+ optical module standard, the devices incorporate multi-tap transmit pre-emphasis to compensate for FR-4 board material loss in line card applications. For additional flexibility, they support backward compatibility using existing 1GbE SFP modules, providing a single PHY design that is capable of interfacing to both new and legacy Ethernet interfaces from a single PCB design.

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