First 50G-PON merchant silicon spurs operator trials

Broadcom has unveiled the industry’s first merchant silicon for the 50-gigabit passive optical network (50G-PON) access standard. Until now, only access equipment players such as Huawei and ZTE had their own 50G-PON silicon.  

A 50G-PON network. Source: Adtran.

Broadcom has announced two 50G-PON devices: an optical line terminal (OLT) chip and the optical networking unit (ONU) 50-PON port to the users.  Both chips include custom hardware from Broadcom to run artificial intelligence (AI) machine-learning algorithms. 

Jim Muth, senior manager of product marketing at Broadcom, says supporting AI benefits the operator and the quality of the end user’s broadband service. 

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The IEEE gears up for the next Ethernet standard

Completing an Ethernet specification takes years of effort. Just ask John D’Ambrosia of Futurewei who has spent the last 15 years chairing various IEEE Ethernet standards.

John D'Ambrosia

He oversaw the standardisation of 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 200/400GbE and he is now chairing two IEEE Task Forces standards addressing 100 and 400 coherent Ethernet.

He is also the Chair of the group looking at new Ethernet applications (NEA) or to give it its full title, the IEEE 802.3 Industry Connections NEA Ad Hoc group.

D’Ambrosia is driving the development of the ‘Beyond 400 Gigabit’ Call-for-Interest work of the NEA group that will define the next Ethernet standard.

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NextIO simplifies top of rack switching with I/O virtualisation

NextIO has developed virtualised input/output (I/O) equipment that simplifies switch design in the data centre.

"Our box takes a single virtual NIC, virtualises that and shares that out with all the servers in a rack"

John Fruehe, NextIO 

The platform, known as vNET, replaces both Fibre Channel and Ethernet top-of-rack switches in the data centre and is suited for use with small one rack unit (1RU) servers. The platform uses PCI Express (PCIe) to implement I/O virtualisation.

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