July 20, 2005

Broadcom's acquisition of eCommerce provider Siliquent Technology greatly accelerates the company's production of 10 GbE converged-NICs (C-NICs) for server LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) applications.

Today, Gartner Dataquest said 10GbE will be a major market opportunity for enterprise networks, since it enables a 10 times (10x) increase in network bandwidth and network throughput over existing 1GbE technology.

Broadcom will acquire Siliquent Technologies, a privately-held developer of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network interface controllers (NICs) with advanced Ethernet processing technology for server networking, network storage, clustering applications and used in very specific, mission-critical eCommerce applications.

Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with research and development facilities in Tel Aviv, Israel, Siliquent develops Ethernet controllers that boost server performance.

Siliquent's advanced Ethernet processing technology is designed to enable servers to improve overall application performance while taking advantage of the emerging convergence of data, storage and clustering technologies into a single, standards-based Ethernet fabric.

The acquisition of Siliquent significantly accelerates Broadcom's delivery of 10GbE converged-NICs (C-NICs) for server LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) applications.

According to NIC and LOM market share and forecast reports from Gartner Dataquest, 10GbE will be a significant market opportunity for enterprise networks since it enables a 10x increase in network bandwidth over today's 1GbE technology.

This rise in bandwidth is driven by increased use and build out of the broadband network infrastructure , more desktops running 1GbE, growing usage of network-intensive applications and even greater amounts of user data stored and accessed on the network.

Gartner Dataquest predicts that 10GbE technology will begin its volume ramp in servers beginning in 2007.

Blade servers are believed to be one of the likely early adopters of 10GbE C-NIC technology.

By completely integrating multiple servers and a switch into a single chassis, the blade server's networking communications occurs over an internal electrically connected backplane.

Through the use of low-cost serializers/deserializers (SerDes) technology, blade servers avoid the need for expensive, power-intensive optical transceivers and fiber optic cables associated with the deployment of 10GbE technology.

Because 10 Gigabit Ethernet C-NICs are able to integrate the SerDes function, many blade servers that are already designed to support 10 gigabit speeds are ready to accept a 10GbE C-NIC solution.

Source: eCommerce Times

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