Broadcom unveils 10G chips that use SFP+

Broadcom this week introduced two 10 Gigabit Ethernet chips that support the SFP+ standard.

Broadcom says that the chips will help switch vendors to create devices with high port counts, from eight channels of 10 Gigabit Ethernet to as many as 48 such channels on next-generation blade servers or enterprise-sized chassis.

The 65-nanometer dual-10 Gigabit Ethernet transceivers would be used in routers, aggregation switches, blade servers and data center switches, Broadcom says. As vendors ramp up their data center switches and blade servers - Force10 Networks' data center switch and Cisco's big blade server are just two very recent examples - they'll need high-density connection options.

SFP+ is the follow-on to SFP, or small form-factor pluggable, a format for transceivers that allows vendors to lots of fiber-optic ports into a small space. SFP+ raises the data rate of SFP to 10G bit/sec, enabling 10 Gigabit Ethernet for both fiber optics and copper wiring.

Broadcom says the chips were designed to exceed the requirements of the IEEE 802.3aq standard that defines 10GBase-LRM, 10 Gigabit Ethernet over multimode fiber. This is the lower-cost option of fiber optics, more suited for an enterprise LAN backbone. Broadcom is positioning the chips as a way to achieve higher bandwidth in an upgrade from a multimode-fiber-based Gigabit Ethernet backbone, while keeping costs down.

The company also claims it sees demand for network bandwidth continuing to rise, across all market segments, despite the economic recession.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.