Broadcom Delivers Industry's Broadest Portfolio of Energy Efficient Ethernet Silicon Solutions

IRVINE, Calif., Oct. 4. Broadcom Corporation, a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, today announced that it has the industry's broadest portfolio of available silicon solutions supporting the newly ratified IEEE Std. 802.3az-2010 Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard. This extensive portfolio includes switch silicon that spans entry level unmanaged to enterprise and metro class switches; single, quad and octal Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) physical layer devices (PHYs); dual and quad 10GbE PHYs; 10/100 and 1GbE controllers, and 10GbE converged network interface controllers (C-NICs). Broadcom EEE-compliant products offer energy savings of up to 70 percent or greater and provide customers with end-to-end silicon and software solutions that enable faster deployment of energy efficient networks.

Broadcom goes beyond the EEE standard with its Energy Efficient Networking (EEN) initiative that enables enhanced energy savings beyond what is inherent in the EEE standard, and provides customers with a faster time-to-market for their EEE-compliant solutions.

As part of the EEN initiative, Broadcom has developed its proprietary AutoGrEEEn technology to facilitate the adoption of EEE and provide a faster migration path for legacy networking equipment. AutoGrEEEn technology implements the EEE standard directly into Broadcom PHYs and allows them to be in EEE mode when interfacing with non-EEE enabled MAC devices, without requiring changes to those devices. This innovation allows customers to make existing network equipment EEE-compliant by simply changing the PHY devices.  

Highlights/Key Facts:
    * Networking equipment, like any other appliance, is subject to rising energy prices and related increases in operational expenditures (OpEx). Thus, energy efficiency is an area of paramount importance. Through its EEN initiative, Broadcom helps alleviate the OpEx burden for end-customers by enabling Broadcom customers to build networking appliances that are more energy efficient.
    * Broadcom EEN provides customers with an end-to-end energy-efficient framework that provides additional power savings by:
          -Supporting the enhanced Layer 2 savings mechanism (optional for triple speed products and mandatory for 10 Gigabit speeds in IEEE Std. 802.3az-2010).
          -Implementing comprehensive control policies in Broadcom PHYs and controllers that allow for optimized, customizable and enhanced energy savings for a wide variety of applications.
    * Broadcom's EEE-compliant switch portfolio includes GbE switches ranging from 5-ports to 48-ports and a 64-port 10GbE solution.
    * Previously announced switch, PHY and controller products that supported the EEE draft standard are compliant with the final standard ratified on September 30th.
    * A comprehensive list of Broadcom's EEE-compliant products is available at Broadcom Energy Efficient Networking.