Applied Micro Circuits Corp., a leader in high speed datacenter and optical transport, embedded Power Architecture® processing and storage solutions, announced that NetXen Inc., a leader in mainstream 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, has chosen the company’s 10 Gigabit Ethernet QT2025 Physical Layer integrated circuit technology for use in its just announced SFP+ optical version and SFP+ direct attach copper interface dual port 10GbE SFP+ (small form-factor pluggable) adapters.

NetXen selected AMCC’s QT2025, a fully integrated 10 Gbps transceiver with fully-adaptive electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) that provides a high performance interface between a MAC or a switch device and optical modules or backplane. The QT2025 also interfaces directly to SFP+ direct attach copper cabling. AMCC’s transport components allow system designers to offer the most cost-effective, high performance, high capacity delivery of enterprise traffic for 10 Gigabit Ethernet datacenter applications.

“The high volume server market is seeing a dramatic increase in 10 Gigabit Ethernet adoption and system designers want NIC solutions that help them make the transition cost-effectively,” said Vikram Karvat, senior director of marketing, NetXen. “AMCC’s QT2025 allows NetXen to design dual port SFP+ NICs that are flexible enough to be used with either the large installed base of fiber in the datacenter or with extremely cost-effective, low power direct attach copper cabling. The combination of AMCC’s PHY technology and NetXen’s Intelligent NICs with FlexLOM™ technology offers a powerful catalyst for the volume server industry’s migration to 10 Gigabit Ethernet.”

NetXen NX3-20GxR is a dual port 10GbE low-profile PCI Express 2.0 card with pluggable SFP+ optical interconnect modules. As part of the company’s third-generation Intelligent NIC® line, the card is based on NetXen's NX3031. It is a high-performance Layer 2 NIC that can support offload of TCP/IP protocols, significantly improving the throughput of servers, server appliances and storage platforms, while reducing host CPU utilization. This allows overall system performance to scale dramatically. AMCC’s QT2025 10 Gbps PHY is also used on NetXen’s NX3-20GCU for the dual port SFP+ card with direct attach copper interface.

“With customers like HP and IBM, NetXen has its finger on the pulse of the volume server market and the design expertise to produce advanced NICs that allow the cost-effective transition to 10-Gigabit Ethernet connectivity,” said Neal Neslusan, director of marketing at AMCC. “AMCC’s low power and robust PHY technology is ideally suited for integration into NetXen’s third-generation NICs because it helps maintain performance and power levels that are required to earn crucial design wins in this competitive market.”

AMCC's transport portfolio delivers cost-effective, high-performance, high-capacity components for enterprises and telecom providers worldwide for applications ranging from access networks to the data center. AMCC’s technology leadership in electronic dispersion compensation (EDC), forward error correction (FEC), Serdes, CDR and FRACn provides efficient and high-performance building blocks to deliver highly integrated components required by key worldwide system vendors, OEMs and ODMs.