Fujitsu Microelectronics America Inc. officially unveiled a 10-Gbit Ethernet switch IC at electronicaUSA Tuesday (March 30). The company made special efforts to keep volume costs of the MB87Q3070 under $1000 a chip, by keeping protocol support to Layer 2 only.
Asif Hazarika, product marketing manager for the device and author of the Communication Design Conference paper, said that the "excess baggage" of Layer 3 protocols may be important for metropolitan applications, but not for the enterprise server clusters and data centers where the switch will be designed into.
The chip employs a unique interface macro, extended XAUI, which can be used in a standard fiber XAUI interface, or with the copper-based CX-4 standard in which four copper interconnects are multiplexed to meet a 10-Gbit channel speed at distances of up to 25 meters.
Hazarika said copper implementations in enterprise applications pit a CX-4 switch directly against Infiniband and similar protocols.
The 12-port switch is an augmentation of an earlier design Fujitsu offered for all-fiber 10-Gbit networks. The core clock speed of the chip is 312.5 MHz, and its aggregate bandwidth is 240 Gbits/s. The 728-lead BGA device is priced initiallyat $825 each in quantities of 10,000, with further price cuts anticipated.
