Cisco spec will deliver 100Gbit/s

Cisco and Cortina Systems have announced their Interlaken protocol specification, which aids chip-to-chip packet transfers, and should lead to faster network kit this year.

Serial hardware based on the specification could deliver over 100Gbit/s throughput for next-generation switches and routers, the firms said. Jim McKeon, product manager, at Cortina Systems, said, “This protocol is fully manufacturable in current 0.13µm silicon technology and we’re developing products using Interlaken, which will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.”

Mark Gustlin, Cisco’s technical leader in the service provider routing technology group, added, “Interlaken provides big improvements in pin counts, giving less power consumption and supports the construction of denser and faster systems.” Cisco said the Interlaken specification will be available under royalty-free licences to encourage other parties to develop a new generation of gigabit-speed routers and switches.

Neil Walker, Cisco’s head of product marketing for core and foundation technologies in Europe, added, “[This spec will help to provide] more bandwidth over and above the 40Gbit/s we can deliver today, allowing service providers to start delivering the services they’re talking about [like converged voice, video and data] through 100Gbit/s interfaces.”

In separate news, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has announced a delay to the ratification of the 10GBase-T KX4 standard, known as 802.3ap, for Ethernet through hardware device backplanes, until 2007.

Carrie Higbie, at cabling specialist Siemon, said, “What they are trying to do here [with KX4] is to get Ethernet pretty much ubiquitously across the network through the backplanes and wire-speed interfaces of, for instance, blade servers.”

Steve Garrison, marketing vice-president of Force10 Networks, said the delay would allow KX4 to be refined. Firms want the standard to deliver high port density for a lower price per port, but the power-consumption per port is currently causing problems, he added.