National Semiconductor Corp has taken the unusual step of launching a Fast Ethernet adaptor board with an AT bus rather than Peripheral Component Interconnect. A relative newcomer to the Ethernet adaptor market – NatSemi launched the InfoMover line in October 1993 (CI No 2,285). The company says independent research it has carried out shows that 75% of personal computers will still be AT bus-based and many of those are high performance machines used by companies thinking of upgrading to 100Mbps Ethernet networks. The InfoMover 10/100plus can be used in either 10Mbps or 100Mbps Ethernet environments and NetSemi says that 10Mbps networks used in high performance personal computers double the boards’ performance board improves performance two-fold. But while the company is confident the AT-based InfoMover 10/100plus board will find a market in AT-based machines, it says it will be launching a Peripheral Component Interconnect version within the next two to three months. With its chip know-how, NetSemi claims to have produced an adaptor to rival all its competitors. LanQuest peer-to-peer tests, using a Grand Junction Networks Inc server used with the NatSemi InfoMover 10/100plus at the client, showed that it matches the rival offering from 3Com Corp on a 10Mbps network. NatSemi says it wants to put the product through real world tests in 100Mbps networks where it expects to increase throughput by seven to eight times compared with a 10Mbps network. Good performance has been achieved, says the company, by putting Plug and Play, Simple Network Management Protocol and Intel Corp’s Desktop Management Interface, which monitors the personal computer’s status, all on the chip. The InfoMover 10/100plus also has Auto-Negotiation, an IEEE-approved a lgorithm that automatically senses, then upgrades, the network to a variety of Ethernet standards without the user having to reconfigure the adaptor or install new drives into the network. It does this by enabling the adaptors to ‘talk’ to the hub. The adaptor then configures the system to support the highest speed and cable type that the boards and hub can support. At the moment the board supports unshielded twisted pair 5 and will support shielded twisted pair by the third or fourth quarter. NatSemi says it will price the product at just above that charged by 3Com for its 10Mbps Ethernet adaptor, when it ships in April, and adds that the biggest hold up now in the move to Fast Ethernet is a lack of hubs. It says that in the US statistics indicate that only 5% of those that can, have moved to Fast Ethernet. NatSemi thinks that this rate will speed up to around 10% to 12% of the community once 3Com, Chipcom Corp and Cabletron Systems Inc unveil hubs in the summer.
