Los Angeles, California-headquartered Broadcom Corp has announced what it claims as the industry’s first repeater controller to support 100Base-T4, 100Base-TX and 100Base-FX Fast Ethernet connections with network management support, all in a single chip. Coupled with the firms’s BCM5000 10/100Base-T4 Fast-Phy Transceiver Chip, the BCM5012 Repeater Controller will enable network manufacturers to easily design 100Mbps FastEthernet repeater hubs starting at under $140 per port, said the company. It supports all three Fast-Ethernet connections, the BCM5012 connects to any media type, including CAT 3, 4 and 5 unshielded twisted pair, shielded twisted pair and fibre optic, said the company. The BCM5012 is said to facilitate network management by Simple Network Management Protocol software through collection of all the IEEE 802.3 Management Information Bases, including the recent additions for 100Base-T. Previous offerings involved designing in an additional chip for management support, making the design more costly and less integrated, said Broadcom. With 13 ports, the company said its chip can support the widely-used repeater model that uses 12 ports of a primary Fast Ethernet connection, either 100Base-T4 or 100Base-TX. The thirteenth port can be a translational port that supports the other connection, or a fibre optic uplink connection, said the firm. It adds that, by using this type of repeater model in a 10-stacked-hub configuration, manufacturers can support up to 130 ports, with various Fast-Ethernet connections, in a single stack. For 100Base-T4 applications, the BCM5012 works with the firm’s BCM5000 10/100Base-T Fast Phy Transceiver Chip. A typical 12-port 100Base-T4 repeater hub application would use a BCM5012 with 12 BCM5000s, noted Broadcom. Coupled with other Phy chips, the BCM5012 also supports 100Base-TX and 100Base-FX applications, and can be designed into stand-alone and stackable repeater hubs, chassis-based repeater modules, and interface repeaters to Fast-Ethernet switch ports, it added. In 1,000-up quantitie s, the BCM5012 costs $108. Engineering samples will be available this month.
