The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium, originally established to develop 25, 50 and 100 Gbps Ethernet specifications, reported Apr. 6 that it's changed its name to the Ethernet Technology Consortium (ETC) to reflect its new focus on higher-speed Ethernet technologies.
Its goal is to enhance the Ethernet specification to operate at new speeds by using other specifications that are developed or in development. This allows the organization to work with other industry groups and standards bodies to adapt Ethernet at a pace that aligns with the rapidly evolving needs of the industry. The ETC has more than 45 members, including Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, Google, Mellanox and Microsoft.
One of the first specifications to be championed by ETC is the 800GBASE-R specification for 800 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), which introduces a new media access control (MAC) and physical coding sublayer (PCS). It essentially repurposes two sets of the existing 400GbE logic from the IEEE 802.3bs standard with a few modifications to distribute data across eight 106 Gb/s physical lanes. As the PCS is reused, the standard RS(544, 514) forward error correction is retained, for simple compatibility with existing physical layer specifications.
