SAN JOSE, Calif. – Chelsio Communications Inc. announced Terminator 5, its first Ethernet controller supporting data rates up to 40 Gbits/second. Beyond traditional use in networking, the chip will compete with Infiniband for clustering and Fibre Channel in storage.
Most adoption of 40 Gbit Ethernet to date has been in core and top-of-rack switches. Servers are expected to gradually adopt the technology starting in 2014, according to many estimates with one market watchers forecasting the 40G market in servers will exceed $600 million by 2017.
“The arrival of the T5 should accelerate the convergence of networking, storage, and clustering around 40G Ethernet,” said Bob Wheeler, senior analyst at The Linley Group (Mountain View, Calif.).
The T5 supports four 10G or two 40G ports. It rides a x8 PCI Express Gen 3 bus and uses two DDR3 memory channels.
The chip supports a laundry list of networking protocols including iWARP RDMA, iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet and Network Address Translation. It also supports PCIe Single Root I/O Virtualization, 8PF/128VF + VEPA/VEB, and 802.1Qbg/h
The T5 will use the same software APIs as Chelsio’s previous T4 generation. The company said it will use the same APIs for a future 100G chip.
The T5 is designed in 45nm SOI CMOS technology and packaged in a 31 x 31mm, 899-pin FCBGA. Customer samples will be available before April and volume quantities are expected before July.
Driver development and reference design kits are available now. The company did not disclose pricing.
Related stories:
- PMC-Sierra leaps into 40G optical
- Mellanox rolls 40G Ethernet switch
- Broadcom rolls 40G PHY chips
