Monday, April 28, 2008

Broadcom Ships PHY Chips

Irvine-based semiconductor firm Broadcom announced today that it has shipped a new chip for the 10 Gigabit Per Second Ethernet market. The new chip, which is used for physical level connectivity in networks, supports the 10GBASE-KR standard, which defines a way to carry high speed, 10 Gigabit Ethernet on backplanes. The new product, the 10GBASE-KR-to-XAUI backplane PHY, is sampling now to early access customers, Broadcom said. The new chip is designed for us in blade server and advanced telecommunitions computing architecture (ATCA) systems. Separately, Broadcom also announced a new chip for supporting 10GBASE-T over unshielded twisted pair cabling. That chip, the BCM8481 10GBASE-T transceiver, is used for providing physical layer connectivity for Gigabit Ethernet over CAT6A and CAT7 Ethernet cables.