Connector and interconnect systems developer FCI partnered with National Semiconductor and Agilent to successfully demonstrate 25 Gb/s differential signal transmission over a backplane link at DesignCon 2011, held Jan. 31 - Feb. 3, 2011 in Santa Clara, California.
"The connector and chip technologies to enable 25 Gb/s lanes over copper backplane links are essential to accomplish narrower 4 x 25 Gb/s implementations of 100 Gb/s links for Ethernet or Infiniband," said David Sideck, global market manager for high speed and power products at FCI.
The backplane demonstrator featured FCI''s AirMax VSe backplane connector system, 28 Gb/s discrete quad-channel retimer technology recently announced by National Semiconductor, and 28 Gb/s pulse pattern generator from Agilent. The backplane link displayed excellent signal integrity with a clean output eye, zero bit errors and excellent jitter performance.
FCI says its AirMax VSe connector provides users of its exisiting AirMax VS connector system with a migration path to higher data rates while preserving the pin assignment flexibility of an open pin field design. The connectors feature backwards mating-compatible interfaces to existing AirMax VS connectors with minimal changes to connector board footprints.
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Further, the connectors combine FCI technologies for a shield-less design with no metallic plates and closely edge-coupled differential pairs with innovative design improvements to yield low loss and crosstalk.
Sideck added, "Moving beyond 10 Gb/s lanes on the backplane will also enable next-generation data center equipment designs to increase backplane capacities to support growing front panel I/O bandwidth demands while significantly reducing the number of required high speed signal traces."
At DesignCon 2011, FCI also demonstrated a wide open eye pattern diagram for 12 Gb/s signal transmission over a 10-meter, 28 AWG Mini-SAS HD cable assembly.
