 |
Lots of product announcements regarding the connector industry took place at the DesignCon 2003 conference, recently held in Santa Clara, Calif., particularly 10 Gbps interconnects.
Winchester Electronics launched their 10 Gbps high-speed connector, the SIP1000. It is a high-speed connector platform designed to enable 10 Gbps serial data transmission in copper backplanes without the need for active equalization techniques. "Designers no longer care about the performance of a connector per se," said Michael P. Driscoll, President of Winchester Electronics. "At 10 Gbps data transmission rates, connector and PWB technology become intertwined as two interdependent technologies meld into one. What designers care about now is the performance of the passive channel, and what the passive channel can allow the active channel to achieve. Once these parameters are understood, then cost vs. performance trade-offs can be made in both passive and active layers."
Using Teradyne's high-speed, high-density connectors, VHDM-HSD and GbX, along with its RaSer X 10 Gbps serial link interface, Rambus Inc. demonstrated a 10 Gbps serial link cell targeted at the harsh backplane environment. The connectors can enable data rates greater than 6.25 Gbps in a real-world environment across copper backplanes. According to Gautam Patel, Signal Integrity Engineer for Teradyne, "Using standard backplane materials, such as FR-4 or Nelco, this system mimics a real-world backplane environment and is a good measure to test the performance."
FCI Electronics exhibited its Metral 4000, a high-speed, 2 mm Futurebus+ backpanel connector system consisting of receptacles and headers. Mysticom Inc. and FCI performed a 10 Gigabit interoperability test demonstration combining Metral connectors and Mysticom's MY3104 10 Gigabit transceiver. The test, running at 3.125 Gbps per lane, showed no errors after 10 hours of continuous operation over a distance of 40" on an FR-4 copper backplane.
According to a Bishop & Assoc. News Brief reporting on DesignCon, "The 10 Gbps backplane interconnect target is alive and well, but implementation appears to have been pushed out at least 1 year. Attendees indicated that current production systems are designed for 3.125 Gbps today with backplane design headroom to permit 5 to 6 Gbps performance."
Susan Woods, Editor-in-Chief
susanw@pennwell.com
