Force10 Networks, the pioneer in building and securing reliable networks, today announced that it has received a patent for its advances in high performance backplane design that increase power and signaling efficiency. Designed to improve manufacturability and control of high speed signaling, the advances protected by Force10’s 17th patent are crucial to the performance and reliability of the TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers. “Innovations in signaling and power are crucial to efficiently supporting higher Ethernet speeds as the demand for more bandwidth continues to grow,” said Joel Goergen, chief scientist and vice president of technology at Force10 Networks. “New and emerging applications are placing increased reliability requirements on the network and a higher level of control over backplane performance is critical to guaranteeing system-level uptime.” The Force10 TeraScale E-Series delivers the reliability, network control and scalability required to build a flexible network that can adapt to evolving and emerging applications. The TeraScale E-Series backplane, which delivers throughput of five Terabits per second, provides a crucial element to ensuring seamless scalability without compromising performance. Additionally, the fully copper backplane of the TeraScale E-Series delivers inherent reliability, eliminating it as a point of failure in the system. In addition to the recent patent, Goergen and John D’Ambrosia, Force10 research scientist and chair of the IEEE Higher Speed Study Group, both received awards from the IEEE802 standards association for their work on the IEEE802.3ap Backplane Ethernet standard. The standard specifies how to transmit Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet up to one meter over backplanes of chassis-based systems and potentially enables network managers to use blade modules from different vendors in the same chassis.