The chip, made by TSMC in an 0.18-micron process, was designed with Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. The MT43132 integrates thirty-two 2.5-Gbit/second Vitesse serializer/deserializers in a 518-pin package.

The device has eight nonblocking, full-duplex 4x ports, each representing 10 Gbits/s. The chip can also scale from eight 4x ports to multitiered systems with 192 ports, when combined with the company's first-generation product, the MT21108 switch.

Infiniband silicon continues to heat up. RedSwitch Inc., a startup emerging from Fujitsu Technologies, announced last week a switch with eight full-duplex ports running at 10 Gbits/s each, also with an integrated physical layer.

But the Mellanox switch marks the first availability of Infiniband silicon to include both the logic and physical layer, barely beating RedSwitch to the punch. The RedSwitch device will start to sample next month, while the Mellanox chip is available today.

"We now have all the necessary building blocks to deploy 10 Gbits/s to the data center, for the first time," said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing for Mellanox. "By integrating the physical layer, no external components are required, which dramatically lowers the cost and simplifies design."

Since Infiniband was first announced last fall, Mellanox has doubled the number of its employees to 200, most of whom work at its headquarters in Yokneam, Israel.

Mellanox has been talking with the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group, pitching Infiniband as the next subset of the CompactPCI interconnect specification. While Gigabit Ethernet has also been mulled to take the legacy Compact PCI standard and make it more fabric-friendly, the company called Infiniband a natural choice. And at the PCI Manufacturers Group meeting next month, Mellanox will further pitch this idea.

"It's still in the early stages," said Deierling. "There are two things being considered on CPCI 3.x: One is Gigabit Ethernet and the other is Infiniband. We're helping to drive that."

Gigabit Ethernet is not an I/O scheme, he said, pointing out, "It doesn't have clustering capability, it doesn't have message-passing paradigms or memory semantics built into it." Infiniband, however, "is designed . . . to enable this," he said.

The chip supports copper or fiber-optic connections. The company is also selling a product development kit that includes an eight-port switch in a 1U chassis, schematics, layout, bill of materials and software development kit. Available now, the chip sells for $458 in lots of 10,000.