February 6, 2008 -- At DesignCon 2008 in Santa Clara, CA, W. L. Gore & Associates (Gore) demonstrated its next-generation extended reach cable assemblies. The company says the assemblies are tailored to enable future High-Performance Computers (HPC) to scale in size and function. The "active" cables deliver extended reach over thinner, lighter copper cabling for HPC systems, enterprise server and storage applications.
At the tradeshow, in collaboration with Quellan Inc., Gore hosted demonstrations of its active extended reach cable assemblies, conforming to industry standard QSFP (4-channel) and SFP+ (2-channel) form-factors and operating at 10-Gbit/sec channel over a 10-meter span of AWG28 copper cable. The cables are designed to address next generation protocols such as InfiniBand Quad Data Rate (QDR), 40-GbE, 10-GbE and 8G Fibre Channel.
The family of new products is constructed with Gore's Advanced Cable Technology and integrates Quellan Q:ACTIVE silicon technology. The complementary effects of the combined technologies reduce link jitter, crosstalk and other signal impairments, contend the companies. The new products will enable a 1RU switch populated with 32 QSFP ports to transport up to 1.280 Tbit/sec of data within future clusters.
Gore says its extended reach cable assemblies promise to offer link distances of greater than 20 m, reducing bundle mass in crowded cable plenums while consuming 5 times less power than fiber-optic technology.
Gore's first generation of active cable products, the GORE Extended Reach DDR InfiniBand cable assemblies, are now in volume production, and have been deployed on multiple top 5 HPC systems.
"We're convinced that low-power, active copper technology is best suited to meet the evolution cycle of data center interconnects, which is currently accelerating at the rate of Moore's Law. To keep this vision alive and economical, you need to employ low-risk components and established supply chains capable of incremental evolution. Quellan's low-power CMOS silicon coupled with Gore's array of advanced cable options and global manufacturing infrastructure does just that," states Eric Gaver, global business leader for Gore's high data rate cabling products. "We're excited to have a copper based interconnect roadmap that's well aligned with the data center vision."
"We're delighted to be a key enabling ingredient in Gore's growing Extended Reach cable portfolio," adds Tony Stelliga, Quellan's chairman and CEO. "We have an exciting array of low-power, Q:ACTIVE devices available and in development to support the rapidly evolving data center vision with Gore. Our analog, CMOS technology is particularly well suited to the removal of link impairments while consuming the least amount of power and offering the lowest signal latency available in the industry."