Solarflare Unveils Industry's First Single-Chip, Sub-6 Watt 10GBASE-T Transceiver

10GBASE-T PHY and enhanced controller drive
widespread adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Irvine, Calif. – April 14, 2008 – Solarflare Communications, the leading provider of standards-based 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) silicon solutions, today announced its next-generation 10GBASE-T PHY and enhanced 10GbE controller products. The new 10Xpress® SFT9001 PHY consumes less than 6.0 watts at maximum 100 meter reach and the Solarstorm™ SFC4000E vNIC controller consumes less than 2.2 watts at full line-rate performance. When combined on a server adapter, Solarflare's 10GbE silicon PHY and controller deliver 10 times the performance of a 1 Gigabit NIC at half the power consumption of previous 10GbE server adapters.

The 10GBASE-T PHY is fully standards compliant, supporting 100-meter reach on standard copper network cabling and is the first 10GBASE-T PHY to support wake on LAN (WOL). With its low power and small footprint, the PHY enables high-density 10GbE switches and dual-port 10GBASE-T adapter cards. The PHY also supports legacy infrastructure and includes cable diagnostics to help ease deployment.

The company's controller has the best performance-per-watt in the industry, achieving line-rate performance in virtualized and non-virtualized environments. The innovative architecture and advanced features of Solarflare's next-generation silicon products provide switch, server and storage vendors with cost-effective technology. This enables them to build and bring to market dual-port 10 Gigabit server and storage adapters, and high-density 10GbE switches, thereby allowing IT managers to easily deploy advanced applications over their networks.

"As business demands continue to grow, there is an ever-increasing need to deploy advanced applications, such as iSCSI and virtualization, that require the next level of networking," said Jag Bolaria, senior analyst at The Linley Group. "Solarflare is showing its leadership through this PHY and controller silicon, both required to build standards-based 10GBASE-T products that can be deployed over copper wiring. By addressing the power, performance and cost of 10 Gigabit networking, Solarflare's next-generation silicon enables 10GbE for volume deployment."

Solarflare designs and develops the highest-performing, lowest-power, standards-compliant 10GbE controllers and 10GBASE-T transceivers on the market. The company's PHY and controller are optimized for applications such as virtualization, network storage convergence and rich media. They enable switch, storage and server original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to build cost effective standards-based products for enterprises and data centers.

"Solarflare continues to lead the market with high-performance, low-power 10 Gigabit Ethernet silicon," said Russell Stern, CEO of Solarflare. "Our next-generation technology is a first in our industry because we are the only company with the solutions that address both power efficiency and performance. We're providing enterprise-class products to OEMs that will continue to push forward the adoption of 10 Gigabit networking."

Specific features of the 10Xpress SFT9001 PHY include:

• IEEE Standard 802-3an-2006™ compliance
  • 100 meter reach on UTP Category 6A cabling including the worst-case, four-connector topology in the presence of alien cross talk
  • Support for legacy and installed copper cabling infrastructure: 55 to 100 meter support for installed Category 6 UTP/STP, and support for Category 5 and Category 5E cabling
• Lowest power, smallest package 10GBASE-T PHY
  • Enables high-density 10GbE switches up to 48 ports in one rack unit (RU) form factor
  • Enables dual-port 10GBASE-T server adapters that are compliant with the PCIe power specification
• Several low power modes including WOL from 100s of mW to under 6.0 watts that enable efficient power management
  • The SFT9001 is the first 10GBASE-T PHY to support WOL, an Ethernet computer networking standard that allows a server to be turned on or woken up remotely by the network
• Multi-speed, auto-negotiation support for 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE-T, provides investment protection and enables independent and asynchronous upgrades of servers and switches
• 10GBASE-T cable diagnostics to address line breaks and reduce network downtime

Specific features of the Solarstorm SFC4000E vNIC controller include:

• Best performance-per-watt controller in the industry
  • 2.2 watts, 18 Gbps bidirectional throughput with 1500 byte maximum transport units (MTUs)
  • Enables single-port, sub-10-watt adapters
• Virtualization and iSCSI protocol acceleration with line-rate performance
  • vNIC architecture supports up to 4096 virtual machines per interface
  • Virtualization acceleration with line-rate performance for all leading platforms, including Xen/Citrix and VMware
• iSCSI data digest offload for SAN/LAN convergence
• Scalable architecture for upcoming octal-core CPUs and platforms provides for flexible, future-proof technology

The 10Xpress SFT9001 will sample in May to top-tier switch and server OEMs and the Solarstorm SFC4000E vNIC is sampling now to Tier 1 server OEMs and other select customers.

About Solarflare Communications, Inc.
Solarflare Communications is a semiconductor company delivering the next level of high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE). As the leading provider of standards-based 10GbE silicon, Solarflare delivers robust and power-efficient solutions that are cost effective and easy to deploy. Now real and ready for primetime, Solarflare 10 Gigabit Ethernet makes possible next-generation applications such as streaming rich media, Web 2.0, server virtualization and network convergence. Solarflare is working with key industry partners and customers to ensure interoperability and drive a 10GBASE-T complete ecosystem. The privately held company is headquartered in Irvine, Calif. with a development center in Cambridge, UK.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.
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Katie Eakins / Amy Robinson
LEWIS PR for Solarflare 
619.677.2700
solarflare@lewispr.com