First 65nm dual KR-to-XAUI PHY rolls

Broadcom Corp. claims the industry's highest performance and lowest power 10GbE PHY in support of the IEEE 10GBASE-KR standard for running 10Gbit/s serial data over backplane systems. The new dual physical layer (PHY) device extends the life of today's existing systems that use four lanes to carry 10 Gbps (XAUI) data rates by providing a four times bandwidth improvement per channel. Today's announcement further extends Broadcom's comprehensive portfolio of field proven and complete end-to-end 10GbE solutions featuring switching products, PHYs and controllers. Broadcom will be demonstrating its 10GBASE-KR PHY solution at Interop 2008.

Today's blade servers and ATCA equipment are self-contained, modularly designed computing systems that typically use a chassis, common backplane and Ethernet connectivity to transfer voice, video, data and multimedia within the system. However, these computing systems can only support single-channel, low bandwidth capabilities (using 1000BASE-X or 1000BASE-KX standards), or four- channel, low bandwidth per channel capabilities (using the 10GBASE-KX4 standard).

With today's higher bandwidth applications (such as virtualization, security/encryption and multimedia), as well as the need to preserve existing systems running at 1Gbit/s or XAUI data rates, serial 10Gbit/s data must now be driven across the backplane. Broadcom was the first silicon vendor to address this market requirement in 2007 and is now introducing its second generation product that supports the new 10GBASE-KR standard for backplane systems.

Designed using 65nm CMOS process technology, the BCM8073 is an all DSP-based 10GbE PHY that provides enterprise data centers with higher bandwidth and performance, as well as significant savings in cost, resources and manpower when upgrading to 10GbE links. The BCM8073 has been verified on more than 300 existing backplane channels and has more than 3dB of margin over the worst case channels encountered in the customer base. The performance surpasses competing analog solutions that cannot sufficiently operate error free over these types of backplane channels.

"Demand for increased bandwidth is growing in every market segment from consumer to enterprise to service/content providers as newer 10GbE technologies become more cost effective," said Lorenzo Longo, senior director and general manager of Broadcom's high-speed interconnect products line of business. "Broadcom is the only silicon provider that offers a complete line of networking components (switches, PHYs and controllers) needed to build an end-to-end 10GbE-based data center. As such, we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the significant growth in this market."

Technical data
The BCM8073 dual serial 10GBASE-KR-to-XAUI backplane PHY is the highest performing solution in the market exceeding the IEEE requirements for the 10GBASE-KR standard and has the ability to drive over 40-inches of FR-4 with 3 backplane connectors. Its all DSP-based architecture allows diagnostic tools to monitor system and channel parameters such as insertion loss, channel frequency response, equalizer response and frequency offsets, in addition to key performance metrics such as BER and SNR.

Other key features include all DSP-based architecture with a fully adaptive datapath, which continuously adapts to changes in the backplane environment such as temperature variations and crosstalk. The device also offers multi-rate with support for 10GBASE-KR, 1000BASE-KX and 2.5Gbit/s applications with auto-negotiation. Other features offer auto programmability with 10G transmitter pre-emphasis support, integrated forward error correction (FEC) capabilities and low power of 1.2W.