In a sign of building momentum toward higher-speed LANs, chip companies have been tripping over each other in recent days to announce their latest silicon supporting 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

Teranetics last week introduced its second generation of integrated circuit, a dual-port 10 Gigabit copper PHY. Of course, it doubles the port density of switches and network interface cards, and the company also claims the chips consume just 6 watts per port and cost one-third as much as first-generation 10GBase-T PHYs, on a per-gigabit basis.

Teranetics says the chips will allow as many as 48 RJ-45 ports of copper-based 10 Gigabit Ethernet in a single rack unit. The chips can also operate at Gigabit or 100Mbps rates.

Meanwhile, Solarflare last week said that switch and server manufacturers are sampling its new 10GBase-T PHY, which also runs at 6 watts or less and uses Wake on LAN technology. 

NetXen this week is announcing its third-generation chips and boards for 10 Gigabit network interface cards and LAN on motherboard, aimed at makers of blade and rack-mounted servers. NetXen NICs allow deployment of up to 4Gbps of Ethernet, with the option to upgrade to 10 Gigabit later on.

NetXen paid Tolly Group to evaluate the technology, and the firm found that it achieved 22Gbps in bidirectional throughput, and higher than 14Gbps in receive throughput for 1,500-byte packets.

The company also says its product takes advantage of the doubling of bandwidth with PCIe 2.0. And it can do a full offload of Fibre Channel over Ethernet in a single chip, which is important for storage networking.

Jeff Caruso is site editor at Network World.