Fulcrum Microsystems and Applied Micro Circuits Corporation today announced a new jointly designed SFP+ 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch reference design that combines Fulcrum’s FocalPoint FM2224 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch chip with AMCC’s QT2035S SFP+ physical layer IC. The companies will demonstrate the solution at the upcoming OFC/NFOEC Technical Conference and Exposition March 25-29 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California. The reference design is the first to marry the space-saving SFP+ module form-factor, which is up to 30% smaller than competing form factors, with a high-performance, low latency switch. The joint Fulcrum/AMCC reference design is a 24-port, pizza-box style switch with 12 SFP+ module cages and 12 CX4 connectors. The AMCC QT2035S IC enables all reaches of 10GE in an SFP+ form factor including SR, LR, LRM and ER. In addition, 10 GbE over twin-axial copper cable is also supported. The use of Fulcrum switching technology ensures wire-rate switching performance with the industry’s lowest latency of 200 ns. The combination provides the highest density and highest performance 10GE switching solution available on the market today. “The 10 Gigabit Ethernet market is continuing its maturation with new technologies like SFP+ coming along to help bring down the costs. When you combine that with low-latency switching, you have a system versatile enough to meet the demands of real-time traffic in a data center or as a server interconnect,” said Mike Zeile, vice president of marketing for Fulcrum Microsystems. “Working with AMCC’s industry leading technology helps us further our goal of facilitating the transition to 10-Gigabit Ethernet by building an ecosystem that makes it easy for designers to develop high-performance products.” “Every design today is striving for lower cost and lower power consumption, and our SFP+ products offer all of that plus a smaller form factor. This new reference design is an example of how we are going to aggressively take this technology to the market,” said Mitch Kahn, vice president of marketing, transport products, AMCC. “We are committed to providing the best physical layer solutions available, and working with Fulcrum’s 10-Gigabit silicon enables both of us to put together an industry-leading, complete processing and switching solution.” FocalPoint family of low-latency switches include the flagship FM2224, a 24-port 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch and, the FM2112, a 24-port switch with eight 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports and 16 Gigabit Ethernet ports. Two other switches in the family include the FM2104 and FM2103, which feature two 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports and eight and four 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, respectively, and are designed for GPON switching card applications. All FocalPoint switches feature an industry-leading 200 nanoseconds (ns) of total latency. The switches combine this low latency with non-blocking throughput, the highest level of integration and the greatest power efficiency, to become the cost-effective and high-performance choice for storage, computing/networking backplane and interconnect applications. The AMCC QT2035S device is the industry's first silicon solution to integrate a standard, XAUI-based PHY with complete SFP+ signal processing. The device includes an advanced electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) circuitry that supports 10GBASE-R and 10GBASE-LRM SFP+ applications as well as operation over a low bandwidth Infiniband twin-axial cable. The QT2035S is low in power dissipation and is offered in 13x13mm leaded or fully RoHS-compliant package.