BY LEE MATHER
The Ethernet Alliance, an industry group dedicated to the continued success and expansion of Ethernet technology, has formed and will serve as an industry resource and help member companies increase acceptance and reduce time-to-market of Ethernet products. It spans all IEEE 802 Ethernet standards, and will support the advancement of existing and emerging Ethernet technologies. Founding members include 3Com, ADC, Agere Systems, AMCC, Aquantia, Broadcom, Force10 Networks, Foundry Networks, Intel, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Pioneer Corp., Quake Technologies, Samsung, Sun Microsystems, Tehuti Networks, Tyco Electronics, the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), and Xilinx.
“Although Ethernet has existed for more than 25 years, it does not have an industry voice that represents the spectrum of IEEE 802 Ethernet standards developments and serves the IEEE 802 Ethernet industry as a whole,” says Brad Booth, president of the Ethernet Alliance. “With the strong support of our founding members, the Ethernet Alliance will be that voice, and we will move aggressively to accelerate the growth and expansion of IEEE 802 Ethernet technologies.”
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In the past, similar alliances supported single IEEE 802 Ethernet projects, but the Ethernet Alliance will exist for as long as it remains relevant to IEEE 802 Ethernet technology, and will support IEEE 802 Ethernet projects. Moreover, the Alliance removes the barrier of start-up and organizational issues that surround individually dedicated efforts, saving both time and money. Activities in 2006 will focus on Ethernet technology incubation, interoperability demonstrations, and education. To promote these, the Alliance has started the incubation process for 100-Gigabit Ethernet; initiated efforts to demonstrate 10GBASE-T, 10GBASE-LRM, and backplane Ethernet interoperability; and plans to show consumer electronic applications. The Alliance also has lined up speakers at key industry events to help communicate the vision and benefits of Ethernet technology-a complete list of appearances may be found at www.ethernetalliance.org. The goal is to demonstrate that new Ethernet technologies are ready for deployment and to provide insight into existing and emerging IEEE 802 Ethernet standards.
In related news, the Alliance brought the latest in Ethernet developments to the International Engineering Consortium (IEC)’s DesignCon 2006 exhibition and conference, which took place February 6-9, 2006, in Santa Clara, CA. At this year’s show, the Alliance presented technical panel sessions and a technical paper to provide educational opportunities and demonstrate possibilities. “The Impact of the Ethernet Ecosystem on Backplane and System Design” discussed backplane design and board fabrication, advanced signal conditioning, overall capacity forecasts, and power requirements and integrity, while “The Need for 100G Ethernet?” held at this year’s first Management Forum, covered features that next-generation devices must possess if they are to support terabit-scale traffic aggregation, reduce the number of network devices, and explore power-related issues. Finally, the technical paper, “Moving 10-Gigabit Ethernet onto UTP: Moving 10GE into a Volume Platform,” explained how to achieve 10 Gbit/s on copper UTP cabling and how to meet the application’s requirements for low power.
