Companies including Intel Corp. and Broadcom Corp. have been pushing for Gigabit Ethernet prices to drop enough to bring the technology to the desktop, and many companies now claim that point has been reached.

Until now, Gigabit Ethernet in the local-area network has been too expensive, "requiring a modular type of solution and requiring fiber to the desktop as well — that was a real cost prohibitor," said Todd McDole, product manager for Nortel Networks.

At N+I, Nortel is showing its newest enterprise switches, the BayStack 380 and 470, respectively equipped with 24 and 48 Ethernet ports that can be configured for 10 Mbit/second, 100 Mbit/s, or 1 Gbit/s.

Silicon integration is another factor boosting Gigabit Ethernet. "For the first time, we can produce stackable Gigabit Ethernet switches in the same form factor as [100-Mbit/s] Fast Ethernet switches," said Martin Lund, product line manager for enterprise switches at Broadcom.

Broadcom's latest Gigabit Ethernet entries are the StrataXGS family of Gigabit Ethernet chips, announced this week. Two members, the BCM5690 and BCM5691, are single-chip, 12-port switches. The 5690 adds a 10-Gbit/s Ethernet interface for aggregation.

Complementing the switches are two switch fabrics. The BCM5670 handles eight ports running the extended attachment unit interface (XAUI) and is intended for aggregating traffic from the 10-Gbit/s ports of BCM5690 switches. The four-port BCM5671 is used for connecting stacked StrataXGS switches, again using the XAUI interface.

Marvell Semiconductor Inc. is at N+I displaying its Prestera EX family of single-chip Gigabit Ethernet switches, announced April 29. Targeted at switching desktop traffic, the EX chips are the enterprise analogue to the company's Prestera MX family for metropolitan-area networks.

Prestera EX succeeds the GalNet II+ and GalNet III chips designed by Galileo Technology Ltd., which Marvell acquired in January 2001. Prestera is intended to improve on GalNet by providing higher density — 12 Gigabit Ethernet ports per chip — and the ability to stack switches. Stacking involves the connection of multiple boxes that will behave as a single, large switch.

Marvell also is announcing the Prestera FX family of switching elements, which are used for interconnecting more than two EX boxes.

National Semiconductor Corp. is showing its first single-chip Gigabit Ethernet switch, the DP83016, part of an ongoing alliance with Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. to jointly develop Ethernet products.

Mixed-signal specialist Cicada Semiconductor Corp. and SwitchCore AB are showing a jointly developed reference design for a 16-port Gigabit Ethernet switch.