Road to 100G

The Road to 100G is a nonprofit corporation formed by its members for the purpose of providing seamless interoperability among the disparate, standards-based components required in building high capacity network elements.

The Alliance states that it is a global community of leading innovative silicon, software and equipment vendors, along with service providers, dedicated to creating a vast ecosystem for accelerating the adoption and ongoing development of a new era of next generation networking platforms. These platforms may include performance nodes from 40G (or 40GE/40GbE, 4x10GE/4x10GbE) to 100G (or 100GE/100GbE).

The Road to 100G Alliance was formally announced on June 19, 2007 at the NXTcomm 2007 show in Chicago, Illinois USA [http://www.roadto100g.org/_pr/19June2007.html (Link to press release)] . The founding members are Bay Microsystems, Enigma Semiconductor, Integrated Device Technology (IDT), IP Infusion, An ACCESS Company, and Lattice Semiconductor.

The alliance is not a standards body, but claims it will deliver proven solutions in the form of complete system designs. It is headquartered in the Silicon Valley area of California. There is an annual fee to become a member of the Road to 100G Alliance.

Although 100G is generally viewed in terms of Ethernet (and sometimes referred to as 100GE or 100GbE), the Road to 100G Alliance plans to address non-Ethernet applications such as OTU-3/40G and soon to be developed OTU-4/100G applications as well.

References

* [http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/lans/2007/0618lan2.html Group pushes 100 Gigabit Ethernet - Network World]

Related Links

* Ethernet Alliance
* 100 gigabit Ethernet
* 40 gigabit Ethernet

External links

* [http://www.ieee802.org/3/ IEEE 802.3]
* [http://www.ethernetalliance.org Ethernet Alliance website]
* [http://www.roadto100g.org Road to 100G Alliance website]
* [http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/ Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) website]