By Valerie Coffey
“Everything from one source” is all the buzz from this year’s DesignCon in Santa Clara, CA, Feb. 6-8. The conference drew over 5,000 registrants at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, while a record-breaking number of 125 exhibitors set up booths and table-top displays.
More and more connector companies are emphasizing their capabilities as system suppliers. Customers prefer not to buy a connector and receptacle in one place, and the cable assembly in yet another. “We focus on a system solution, helping customers with their architecture problems,” says Cathy Palmer, marketing communications manager for Amphenol TCS (Nashua, NH, recently Teradyne Connection Systems). “It’s an iterative process. Almost all product development is now a result of working with customers.”
 Attendees of DesignCon 2006 wait for a conference session to begin February 6 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. |
Companies like ODU (Mühldorf, Germany) and Cinch (Lombard, IL) are also focusing on everything from one source. This means custom solutions are emerging as a trend, like custom connectors designed to solve the individual problems of the customer. The trend, says one connector industry executive, is in large part a result of the commoditized consumer market, described as “profitless prosperity,” the case in which a company has very high-volume sales without showing a positive revenue from those sales. Service to the customer is an important way of adding value.
Powerful exhibition
As usual, DesignCon featured one of the most significant technology exhibitions for the connector/interconnection industry in the U.S., with many companies ringing out important news and technological advancements at the show. KeyEye Communications, a 10-Gbit/s copper media transceiver provider in Sacramento, and connector manufacturer Hirose Electric (Simi Valley, CA), demonstrated 10-Gbit/s Ethernet links using Category 6 copper cabling at the Hirose booth. KeyEye and Hirose demonstrated how to link servers, switches, and storage devices using commonly available, lightweight, and flexible structured copper cabling, as opposed to expensive fiberoptic solutions or unwieldy specialty cabling. The solution is designed to enable data-center developers to economically build larger-scale clusters and expand network, computing, and storage resources. The demonstration used KeyEye’s KX1001 transceivers, Hirose’s RJ-45 connectors, and Category 6 copper cabling. A Spirent SmartBits network performance analysis system monitored and analyzed the 10-Gbit/s Ethernet signals.
Connector manufacturer FCI (Etters, PA) revealed its 29-position, right-angle receptacle connector for attaching serial-attached SCSI (SAS) hard disk drives (HDDs) to processor blades, storage blades, mezzanine cards, or embedded system boards in datacom and industrial equipment. Receptacle openings are offset from the top surface of the carrier board to provide clearance for components mounted under a hard drive. Nominally 4.7-mm clearance is provided under a 2.5" hard drive. The high-speed serial interface is designed to support differential signaling at speeds of 3.0 Gbit/s. The SAS receptacle accepts either SAS or serial ATA (SATA) drives, giving the system manufacturer the option to deploy cost-effective SATA drives or higher-performance SAS drives for mission-critical applications.
Interconnect Technologies (Springfield, MO) exhibited its first release of the Databank, a web-based virtual prototyping tool that allows designers to quickly assess various connectors, laminate materials, and PCB stackup configurations for high-speed signal applications ranging from 2.5 to 10 Gbit/s. The Databank outputs the expected performance of the channel in real time, including S-parameters, time-domain reflectometry information, pulse response, and the resulting eye diagram. Mike Oltmanns, marketing manager for Interconnect Technologies, said, “Unlike many modeling systems, each connector and material variation has been validated through test piece fabrication ensuring extreme model accuracy.”
Interconnect Technologies also demonstrated a 10-Gbit/s system under multi-aggressor crosstalk with the FCI AirMax VS connection system. The reference design, which was implemented in an AdvancedTCA physical architecture, used the Databank as a design tool to perform fast evaluation of various design attributes. Several industry-leading connectors are available in the Databank, including the Amphenol TCS/Molex GbX, as well as the Tyco/ERNI-ZD and 2-mm Hard Metric systems. The Databank can be accessed through Interconnect Technologies or via licensing agreements.
Also at DesignCon, LeCroy Corporation (Chestnut Ridge, NY) demonstrated the WaveExpert, the first LeCroy instrument to combine the high bandwidth and accuracy of a sampling oscilloscope with the speed and flexibility of a real-time instrument. Billed the “world’s fastest oscilloscope,” the WaveExpert offers 100-GHz bandwidth and up to 512 Mpts of memory, and an Accelerated Throughput Architecture (ATA) for quick generation of eye diagrams and analysis of large data arrays.
Dr. Barry Sullivan, DesignCon 2006 program director, presided at the annual DesignVision Awards, recognizing innovative products and services in electronic design. This year’s award winners include the Crossbow connector from Amphenol TCS; Cadence X Architecture Design Solution from Cadence Design Systems in the category of ASIC & IC Design Tools; the Pioneer-NTB SystemVerilog Testbench automation tool from Synopsys in the category of Design Verification Tools; and the BERTSCOPE CR Clock Recovery from Synthesys Research in the Test and Measurement Equipment category.
A new feature of the show this year was podcasts. These MP3 files of keynote addresses and exhibitor spotlights were broadcast from the event to those listening remotely on iPods or from their computers. The podcasts can be downloaded from archives at www.designcon.com/2006. DesignCon 2007 will again be held at the Santa Clara Convention Center next year, January 29-Feb. 1.
