Broadcom Announces Industry's Smallest and Most Powerful Multi-Port Single-Chip 10G Ethernet Converged Controllers

IRVINE, Calif., Dec. 14, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq: BRCM), a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, today announced its latest generation of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) converged controllers designed for high-volume, converged local-area-network-on-motherboard (LOM) and converged network adapter applications. The new 40 nanometer (nm) controller family represents the industry's first offering of quad-port converged controllers, delivering up to twice the port density—and many more features— in the industry's smallest footprint with extremely low power per port, enabling manufacturers to transition more of their product lines to high-speed 10GbE connectivity in a cost-effective manner.

Among the first solutions in the industry supporting the latest PCI Express® (PCIe®) 3.0 specification, the new 40nm Broadcom® converged controller family enables server manufacturers to reduce bill of material (BOM) costs while increasing performance and functionality. On-chip protocol processing offload engines such as iSCSI, FCoE, TCP, and RDMA-ready hardware provide data center managers with a significant increase in storage and networking performance, while consuming less power and freeing up host CPU resources to perform other functions. Each device delivers industry-leading networking and storage performance via bi-directional line-rate on all 10G ports simultaneously.

The new 10GbE converged controller family includes:

• The BCM57800 dual-port 10GbE / dual-port 1GbE controller
• The BCM57810 dual-port 10GbE controller
• The BCM57840 quad-port 10GbE controller

According to IT analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), the 10GbE transition is being driven by the increased use of virtual machines which require greater bandwidth and performance. Each product in the portfolio offers a complete set of virtualization capabilities including PCI-SIG Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), NIC Partitioning, and Virtual Embedded Bridge (VEB).  This variety of virtual machine (VM) traffic switching modes coupled with PCIe 3.0 specification support results in an innovative architecture framework for improving throughput and latency of VM-to-VM switching.

Highlights/Key Facts:

• The new converged controllers are designed to deliver the industry's best performance with up to 67 percent higher input/output per second (IOPS) as compared to Broadcom's previous generation 10G offering.
• From a footprint perspective, the new converged controllers utilize only 0.82 square inches of space for up to four ports of converged 10GbE; including serializers/deserializers (SerDes) for SFP+ rack server and 10GBASE-KR for blade server applications.
• The new family of converged controllers includes baseline server features such as Wake-on-LAN, Remote Boot (PXE), and NC-SI server management.
• Additional power savings in low utilization periods are achieved with Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) capabilities that further reduce power consumption in 10GBASE-T applications.
• Broadcom offers a broad portfolio of physical layer (PHY) devices with dual-media capabilities to support a mix of different physical layer standards such as 10GBASE-T and SFP+.
• The new 40nm 10G controllers are currently sampling to early access customers with production ramp expected in the second half of 2011.

Quotes:

Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group

"The explosion in data center traffic is driving demand for 10GbE server solutions and this market demand is expected to accelerate throughout 2011. 10GbE solutions are now a must have for data centers as data managers struggle to keep up with the massive amount of traffic from a variety of sources."

Vinod Lakhani, Senior Director & General Manager, Broadcom High-Speed Controllers

"Broadcom has shipped over 40 million converged controller ports which speaks to the maturity of the market. With our latest generation of 40nm 10G controllers, we once again raise the performance and integration bar which will help drive the 10GbE transition further into the data center."

Brian Payne, Director of Server Platform Marketing, Dell, Inc.

"As a leading provider of converged Ethernet solutions to Dell for several generations of servers at both 1GbE and 10GbE, Broadcom continues to be an important technology partner."

Resources:

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About Broadcom

Broadcom Corporation is a major technology innovator and global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications.  Broadcom products enable the delivery of voice, video, data and multimedia to and throughout the home, the office and the mobile environment.  We provide the industry's broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art system-on-a-chip and software solutions to manufacturers of computing and networking equipment, digital entertainment and broadband access products, and mobile devices.  These solutions support our core mission: Connecting everything®.

Broadcom, one of the world's largest fabless communications semiconductor companies, with 2009 revenue of $4.49 billion, holds more than 4,500 U.S. and 1,900 foreign patents, and has more than 7,800 additional pending patent applications, and one of the broadest intellectual property portfolios addressing both wired and wireless transmission of voice, video, data and multimedia.

A FORTUNE 500® company, Broadcom is headquartered in Irvine, Calif., and has offices and research facilities in North America, Asia and Europe.  Broadcom may be contacted at +1.949.926.5000 or at www.broadcom.com.

Cautions regarding Forward-Looking Statements:

All statements included or incorporated by reference in this release, other than statements or characterizations of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on our current expectations, estimates and projections about our industry and business, management's beliefs, and certain assumptions made by us, all of which are subject to change.  Forward-looking statements can often be identified by words such as "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "predicts," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "may," "will," "should," "would," "could," "potential," "continue," "ongoing," similar expressions, and variations or negatives of these words.  Examples of such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements about the demand for 10GbE converged controller solutions, our position in that space, and the timing of volume production for the BCM57800, BCM57810 and BCM57840 converged controller solutions. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause our actual results to differ materially and adversely from those expressed in any forward-looking statement.

Important factors that may cause such a difference for Broadcom in connection with its BCM57810, BCM57810 and BCM57840 10GbE converged controllers include, but are not limited to:

• Delays in the adoption and acceptance of industry standards;
• the rate at which our present and future customers and end-users adopt Broadcom's technologies and products in the markets;
• problems or delays that we may face in shifting our products to smaller geometry process technologies and in achieving higher levels of design integration; and
• the timing of customer-industry qualification and certification of our products and the risks of non-qualification or non-certification.

Additional factors that may cause Broadcom's actual results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to the list that can be found at http://www.broadcom.com/press/additional_risk_factors/Q42010.php.

Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, recent Current Reports on Form 8-K, and other Securities and Exchange Commission filings discuss the foregoing risks as well as other important risk factors that could contribute to such differences or otherwise affect our business, results of operations and financial condition.  The forward-looking statements in this release speak only as of this date. We undertake no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statement, except as required by law.

Broadcom®, the pulse logo, Connecting everything®, and the Connecting everything logo, are among the trademarks of Broadcom Corporation and/or its affiliates in the United States, certain other countries and/or the EU. Any other trademarks or trade names mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

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