Broadcom introduced the first quad port 40GbE gearbox PHY supporting 20 Gbps input/output (IO) designs and engineered for high density switch environments..
The new 28nm device (BCM82764), which is optimized as a companion device to Broadcom’s new StrataXGS Tomahawk Switch Series, is a high density gearbox physical layer transceiver (PHY) that converts 20 Gbps signals to multiple lanes running at 10 Gbps. Using Broadcom’s companion PHY, customers have the option to provide legacy 40GbE ports while taking advantage of the full bandwidth of the switch.
Key Features
- 19 x 19mm small form factor package specifically designed to interconnect with QSFP modules
- Ultra low-power dissipation under 1 watt per port
- Features four 2 x 20 Gbps to 4 x 10 Gbps bidirectional SerDes
- Three-dimensional internal eye mapper on each line-side and system-side receiver
- Supports standard Ethernet and HiGig data rates
- 10G Ethernet pass through mode
- Sampling is underway
“The introduction of Broadcom’s StrataXGS Tomahawk Switch Series and companion quad-port gearbox PHY once again demonstrates our ability to bring a cohesive solution to market,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, Broadcom Executive Vice President and General Manager, Infrastructure & Networking Group. “Our new 40G Ethernet gearbox facilitates extremely large switch radixes while using minimal power and real estate, providing a very attractive option for system designers developing next generation cloud scale networking equipment.”
In September, Broadcom introduced its next-generation, StrataXGS “Tomahawk” switch, packing 2 Tbps of switching performance in a single chip that is capable of supporting 32 ports of 100 Gigabit Ethernet, 64 ports of 40GE/50GE or 128 ports of 25GE.
The new chip, which represents the 7th generation of Broadcom Ethernet switching silicon, is designed for the programmable fabrics needed in next-gen, cloud-scale data centers.
The StrataXGS Tomahawk Series is powered by more than 7 billion integrated transistors in 28nm. It supports new 25GE and 50GE protocol standards, and is the first chip to scale to 32-ports of 100G on a single device.
Significantly, Tomahawk implements Broadcom’s FLEXGS and Smart-Flow technology, enabling the switch to be software configured for specific policies while preserving deterministic latency. The new design brings a 12X increase in application policy scale compared to previous generation switches, along with increased flexibility of packet lookups and key generation, and rich load balancing and traffic redirection controls. This supports an extensive suite of user configurable functions for flow processing, security, network virtualization, measurement/monitoring, congestion management and traffic engineering.
