BY PATRICK McLAUGHLIN
Amphenol TCS (www.amphenol.com) says its recently introduced XCede connector platform is designed to enable future data rate requirements-including and beyond 20 Gbits/sec-for datacom, telecom, storage, and wireless equipment.
The company says the platform meets and exceeds standard specifications set for Ethernet, SONET/SDH, PCIe, Fibre Channel, and Infiniband, among others, while employing a press-fit attachment.
The connector’s 3D shielding technology enables very low crosstalk, the company says, and incorporates advanced materials to prevent high-frequency resonances. Additionally, design features within the connector remove skew within any differential pair, which simplifies the board-layout process.
“This level of electrical performance and design flexibility allows equipment manufacturers to reliably meet today’s data rates and easily implement performance upgrades in the future, as higher-performing silicon becomes available,” the company said when announcing the product.
“We are very excited to be bringing the XCede connector to market as it offers the highest performance in a compliant pin, press-fit design,” says Andreas Pfahnl, product strategy and development manager for Amphenol TCS. “Extensive interviews with our customers throughout the design of this product ensured that we could deliver a connector platform that meets the needs across a broad range of markets. Customers emphasized they need headroom in today’s packaging to deliver even more bandwidth down the road, without the need for costly and time-consuming redesign. We’re confident that XCede delivers.”
Amphenol TCS says design flexibility in interconnect packaging plays a key role as system-architecture designs become increasingly complex and demand higher performance levels. The XCede platform offers up to 82 differential pairs per inch, which the company says helps overcome interconnect-design challenges. The company also claims this density enables designers to meet the high-density needs of architectures with multiple front or rear fabric slots, and blade systems with cooling straight through the backplane. Secondary routing channels in the connector backplane footprint mean escape is possible on all three sides of the connector module, thereby allowing design flexibility to route congested areas and providing the ability to reduce the number of routing layers required.
The platform supports two-pair (27.5 differential pairs/inch) and six-pair (82 differential pairs/inch) versions, and integrated power and guidance.
