SAN FRANCISCO - Fujitsu Microelectronics America Inc. officially unveiled a 10-Gbit Ethernet switch IC at the electronicaUSA conference here Tuesday.
The company made special efforts to keep volume costs of the MB87Q3070 under $1,000 a chip, by keeping protocol support to Layer 2 only.
Asif Hazarika, product marketing manager for the device, 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.
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