Broadcom announces industry's first 25G IEEE 802.3bj compliant Lite-PHYs

OFC Technical Conference 2014, SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Broadcom Corp. has announced the industry's first IEEE 802.3bj compliant physical layer devices (Lite-PHYs).

Designed for the next generation 100G datacenter and enterprise front panel and backplane interconnect applications, the low-power 28 nanometer (nm) BCM8207x and BCM8238x Lite-PHYs support 4X25G backplane and line cards for the rollout of 100 Gigabit per second (Gbps) switches.

Developed in response to the rapid growth of server, network and internet traffic, the IEEE 802.3bj standard meets the need for higher data rates over backplanes and copper cables for 100 Gbps throughput. The new generation of low-power high density PHYs enables customers to design IEEE 802.3bj-compliant 100G products that support 100GBase-CR4/SR4/LR4 on the front panel and 100GBase-KR4 on the backplane.

The BCM8207x and BCM8238x are low power and integrate high performance equalizer functions to support 100 Gigabit over Ethernet (GbE), as well as 10 GbE and 40 GbE applications. The BCM8207x Lite-PHY is optimized to enable high bandwidth and dense backplane interconnect while the BCM8238x Lite-PHY is optimized to drive CFP2/CFP4/QSFP28 optical modules.

The BCM8207x and BCM8238x integrate AC-coupling capacitors on all high-speed receivers. Adaptive equalization on both the host and line side interfaces compensate for channel loss across long PCB traces and across backplanes and twin-ax DAC cables. The devices include support for IEEE 802.3bj Clause 91 Forward Error Correction (FEC) standard.