Broadcom was the first to produce a chip for Gigabit Ethernet that could be used over existing copper cabling, and it has now teamed up with US networking equipment giant 3com to develop equipment around the chips.
The core of the deal is the BCM5700 chip, the first Gigabit Ethernet Media Access Controller (MAC) chip that supports Peripheral Computer Interconnect (PCI) and PCI-X local bus interfaces for use in network interface cards (NIC) and LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM) implementations. It was developed between Broadcom and the Gigabit NIC division of Alteon WebSystems, which 3Com is acquiring.
""We believe that the strategic alliance with Broadcom will dramatically accelerate the industry's transition to Gigabit Ethernet,"" said Bruce Claflin, president and COO of 3Com. We believe that this alliance represents the next great wave in the network access market.""
The key to the chip is the level of integration. The chip includes support for 10/100/1000Mbit/s operation, dual high-speed on-chip processors, 128KBytes of integrated on-chip memory, advanced packet classification engines, and PCI/PCI-X 1.0 local bus interconnects in a single-chip solution.
Support for PCI-X allows the chip to maintain traffic at Gigabit speeds in I/O intensive server applications where multiple communication and storage peripheral devices share the same I/O bus.
"By the middle of 2001, we expect that PCI-X will be enabled in new mainstream server platforms from all leading server vendors,“ said Bert McComas, analyst for InQuest market research. "PCI-X builds on the momentum of PCI as the most widely supported I/O standard in the world, and defines a clear path to satisfy next generation server I/O performance demands.“
Through the alliance, 3Com and Broadcom will share intellectual property and engineering teams, jointly develop new products and cross license technology. An alliance logo has been created featuring both companies logos, which will be used on Gigabit Ethernet products from the alliance.
