Broadcomm Unveils Latest Generation of its 10GbE 40nm Controller Family
(Nanowerk News) Broadcom Corporation, a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, today announced its latest generation of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) converged controllers designed for high-volume, converged local-area-network-on-motherboard (LOM) and converged network adapter applications. The new 40 nanometer (nm) controller family represents the industry's first offering of quad-port converged controllers, delivering up to twice the port density—and many more features— in the industry's smallest footprint with extremely low power per port, enabling manufacturers to transition more of their product lines to high-speed 10GbE connectivity in a cost-effective manner.
Among the first solutions in the industry supporting the latest PCI Express® (PCIe®) 3.0 specification, the new 40nm Broadcom® converged controller family enables server manufacturers to reduce bill of material (BOM) costs while increasing performance and functionality. On-chip protocol processing offload engines such as iSCSI, FCoE, TCP, and RDMA-ready hardware provide data center managers with a significant increase in storage and networking performance, while consuming less power and freeing up host CPU resources to perform other functions. Each device delivers industry-leading networking and storage performance via bi-directional line-rate on all 10G ports simultaneously.
The new 10GbE converged controller family includes:
  • The BCM57800 dual-port 10GbE / dual-port 1GbE controller
  • The BCM57810 dual-port 10GbE controller
  • The BCM57840 quad-port 10GbE controller
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    According to IT analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), the 10GbE transition is being driven by the increased use of virtual machines which require greater bandwidth and performance. Each product in the portfolio offers a complete set of virtualization capabilities including PCI-SIG Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), NIC Partitioning, and Virtual Embedded Bridge (VEB). This variety of virtual machine (VM) traffic switching modes coupled with PCIe 3.0 specification support results in an innovative architecture framework for improving throughput and latency of VM-to-VM switching.
    Highlights/Key Facts:
  • The new converged controllers are designed to deliver the industry's best performance with up to 67 percent higher input/output per second (IOPS) as compared to Broadcom's previous generation 10G offering.
  • From a footprint perspective, the new converged controllers utilize only 0.82 square inches of space for up to four ports of converged 10GbE; including serializers/deserializers (SerDes) for SFP+ rack server and 10GBASE-KR for blade server applications.
  • The new family of converged controllers includes baseline server features such as Wake-on-LAN, Remote Boot (PXE), and NC-SI server management.
  • Additional power savings in low utilization periods are achieved with Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) capabilities that further reduce power consumption in 10GBASE-T applications.
  • Broadcom offers a broad portfolio of physical layer (PHY) devices with dual-media capabilities to support a mix of different physical layer standards such as 10GBASE-T and SFP+.
  • The new 40nm 10G controllers are currently sampling to early access customers with production ramp expected in the second half of 2011.
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    About Broadcom
    Broadcom Corporation is a major technology innovator and global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications. Broadcom products enable the delivery of voice, video, data and multimedia to and throughout the home, the office and the mobile environment. We provide the industry's broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art system-on-a-chip and software solutions to manufacturers of computing and networking equipment, digital entertainment and broadband access products, and mobile devices. These solutions support our core mission: Connecting everything®.
    Broadcom, one of the world's largest fabless communications semiconductor companies, with 2009 revenue of $4.49 billion, holds more than 4,500 U.S. and 1,900 foreign patents, and has more than 7,800 additional pending patent applications, and one of the broadest intellectual property portfolios addressing both wired and wireless transmission of voice, video, data and multimedia.
    Source: Broadcom (press release)
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