Broadcom Introduces Industry's Lowest Power, Lowest Cost OC-192 Framer Device for 10-Gigabit Data Traffic.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

ANAHEIM, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 19, 2001

Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq:BRCM): Optical Fiber Communication Conference

Framer Device Enables OEMs to Build High Density, Low Cost OC-192

Line Cards for Gigabit/Terabit and High-End Aggregation WAN Routers

Broadcom Corporation (Nasdaq:BRCM), the leading provider of integrated circuits enabling broadband communications, today announced the Broadcom(R) BCM8501, a single-chip OC-192 Packet over SONET/Asynchronous Transfer Mode (POS/ATM) framer and mapper with a power dissipation of only 2.7 watts, which is 60% lower than today's competitive solutions. This low-power chip eliminates heat sinks, fans and extra power supplies, resulting in higher density OC-192 (9.953 Gigabit per second/Gbps) line cards for wide area network (WAN) gigabit/terabit routers and high-end aggregation routers. High density optical line cards enable service providers to handle more bandwidth in a smaller physical space, allowing them to better accommodate today's phenomenal growth in Internet traffic.

The BCM8501 broadens Broadcom's optical transport product offering, enabling the company to provide complete silicon solutions for OC-192 line cards in WAN equipment. More specifically, this framer/mapper device can be coupled with Broadcom's low-power CMOS OC-192 single-chip transceiver, the X-PHY(TM) BCM8150 announced today, to develop very high-density line cards with a power dissipation of only 4 Watts -- a fraction, or 30%, of today's most competitive solutions.

Broadcom is the only company offering a complete line of SONET physical layer silicon solutions produced entirely using CMOS technology. This uniform technology base allows the company to rapidly develop the next generation of highly integrated, low power optical transport silicon solutions. Broadcom's early development partners are already envisioning faster, denser and more integrated systems enabled by this higher level of silicon integration. Broadcom's optical transport IP cores, such as the OC-192 POS Mapper/Framer or FEC cores, when combined with its OC-192 CMOS transceivers, provide the highest port density system-on-chip solutions to optical equipment manufacturers.

"The Internet traffic explosion is placing significant bandwidth demands on both core and aggregation WAN routers," said Dr. Armond Hairapetian, Sr. Director of Broadcom's Optical Transport Line of Business. "As Internet traffic moves from the end-user and the enterprise to the optical transport network, it is aggregated and routed by high throughput WAN routers. Fatter pipes are required to accommodate the traffic growth, so routers are migrating from OC-48 (2.488 Gbps) ports to faster OC-192 ports. With our low-power and low-cost solution, manufacturers can now build higher bandwidth and denser solutions with significantly lower power requirements, yielding significant cost savings to service providers."

According to Ryan Hankin Kent, Inc. (RHK), an industry research group, Internet traffic surpassed voice traffic during 2000, and is expected to grow exponentially over the next several years. This has fueled a massive overhaul of the optical transport network with the deployment of new technologies such as Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM). Meanwhile, this Internet traffic must be aggregated and routed by core and edge WAN routers for transmission over the new DWDM network infrastructure. The BCM8501 framer/mapper, coupled with Broadcom's all-CMOS transceivers, provide a very dense, cost-effective and low-power solution to groom Internet traffic at 10 Gbps data rates.

BCM8501 Framer/Mapper Product Features

The BCM8501 employs technology developed by NewPort Communications, which Broadcom acquired in October 2000. Broadcom's chip performs SONET/SDH framing and overhead processing and POS/ATM mapping functions at the OC-192 (9.953 Gbps) rate. The device provides full section and line overhead processing, and supports framing, scrambling/descrambling, alarm signal insertion and detection, and bit-interleaved parity (B1/B2) processing.

On the line side, the BCM8501 interfaces to Broadcom's OC-192 CMOS transceiver chip (the BCM8150) through a full-duplex 16-bit, 622 MHz LVDS parallel interface (SFI-4). On the system side, the chip interfaces to higher layer devices such as network processors via a 64-bit, 200 MHz High Speed Transceiver Interface (HSTL) Serial Peripheral Interface-4 (SPI-4) Phase 1 compliant system interface.

The BCM8501 is produced in 0.18-micron CMOS process technology.

Pricing and Availability

The BCM8501 is available today. It is packaged in a 612-pin HSBGA package and is priced at $295 in quantities of 10,000. An evaluation kit consisting of the BCM8501 and the BCM8110/8111 transceiver chips is also available.

About Broadcom

Broadcom Corporation is the leading provider of highly integrated silicon solutions that enable broadband digital transmission of voice, video and data. Using proprietary technologies and advanced design methodologies, the company designs, develops and supplies system-on-a-chip solutions for broadband communications markets. Broadcom products enable communications for applications in cable set-top boxes, cable modems, high-speed local, metropolitan and wide area and optical networks, home networking, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), carrier access, residential broadband gateways, direct broadcast satellite and terrestrial digital broadcast, digital subscriber lines (xDSL), wireless communications, SystemI/O(TM) server solutions and network processing. Broadcom is headquartered in Irvine, Calif., and may be contacted at 949-450-8700 or at www.broadcom.com.

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995:

This release may contain forward-looking statements based on our current expectations, estimates and projections about our industry, management's beliefs, and certain assumptions made by us. Words such as "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "plans," "believes," "seeks," "estimates," "may," "will" and variations of these words or similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. In addition, any statements that refer to expectations, projections or other characterizations of future events or circumstances, including any underlying assumptions, are forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Therefore, our actual results could differ materially and adversely from those expressed in any forward-looking statements as a result of various factors.

Important factors that may cause such a difference for Broadcom in connection with the BCM8501 product include, but are not limited to, the timing and successful completion of technology and product development through volume production; general economic conditions and specific conditions in the markets we address, including periodic downturns in the semiconductor industry; the rate at which our present and future customers and end-users adopt Broadcom's technologies and products in the markets for optical transport; delays in the adoption and acceptance of industry standards in the foregoing markets; the timing of customer-industry qualification and certification of our products and the risks of non-qualification or non-certification; the timing, rescheduling or cancellation of significant customer orders; the loss of a key customer; the volume of our product sales and pricing concessions on volume sales; silicon wafer pricing and the availability of foundry and assembly capacity and raw materials; the qualification, availability and pricing of competing products and technologies and the resulting effects on sales and pricing of our products; intellectual property disputes and customer indemnification claims; fluctuations in the manufacturing yields of our third party semiconductor foundries and other problems or delays in the fabrication, assembly, testing or delivery of our products; our ability to specify, develop or acquire, complete, introduce, market and transition to volume production new products and technologies in a timely manner; the effects of new and emerging technologies; the effectiveness of our product cost reduction efforts; the risks of producing products with new suppliers and at new fabrication and assembly facilities; problems or delays that we may face in shifting our products to smaller geometry process technologies and in achieving higher levels of design integration; the risks and uncertainties associated with our international operations; our ability to retain and hire key executives, technical personnel and other employees in the numbers, with the capabilities, and at the compensation levels needed to implement our business and product plans; changes in our product or customer mix; the quality of our products and any remediation costs; the effects of natural disasters and other events beyond our control; the level of orders received that can be shipped in a fiscal quarter; and other factors.

Our forthcoming Annual Report on Form 10-K, recent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, recent Current Reports on Forms 8-K and 8-K/A, and other Securities and Exchange Commission filings discuss some of the important risk factors that may affect our business, results of operations and financial condition. We undertake no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason.

Broadcom(R), the pulse logo, SystemI/O(TM) and X-PHY(TM) are trademarks of Broadcom Corporation and/or its affiliates in the United States and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.