IEEE 802.3’s progressing “Moving Beyond 400Gb/s Ethernet Study” group members held a highly interactive and successful video webinar in conjunction with Lightwave with an excellent question and answer sections. This was a 100+ page three-hour rich experience meet up with key observations, data, and current conclusions from various industry leaders. After the recent EA’s TEF, […]
Ethernet Alliance holds a successful Technical Exploration Forum
Ethernet’s Alliance Technical Exploration Forum was a very successful online video conference with an excellent question and answer sections. This was a 150+ page 10 hour rich experience meet up with perspectives of different industry leaders. A key consensus takeaway was: due to currently unattainable SerDes power & cooling practical limits, Co-Packaged Optical interconnects will […]
SFP, SFP-DD, QSFP, QSFP-DD & OSFP Pluggable interconnects – a 2021 update
The 21-year-old Pluggable interconnect family is now being used for new accelerator, AV, camera, machine vision, medical, memory, NVM, and proprietary interface links. New market segment expansion seems likely to continue with link shipments rising and healthy unit forecasting. New higher speed 106G and 112G per lane pluggable products will be coming out this year, […]
MicroQSFP, QSFPDD,OSFP interconnect systems chosen by IEEE
Just recently in Vancouver, the Ethernet IEEE-802.3cd Standards Committee voted yes simultaneously to include MicroQSFP, QSFP-DD and OSFP interconnect modules as MDI (media dependent interface) options. The remarkable singular vote, of 66 yes, 0 no, and 14 abstain, seemed to reflect the wide and deep need to support different types of new and established enterprise, […]
OSFP interconnect: what is it?
OSFP, Octal Small Formfactor Pluggable, is a very new module and interconnect system in development that is targeted to support 400-G optical data links inside datacenters, campuses and external metro long reach. The private consortium OSFP MSA group was founded by Google and is led by Arista Networks. This consortium already has more than 50 […]
New I/O standards use different lane count circuits to drive new connector use in DCs
InfiniBand is a very high-speed server fabric I/O network with various lane counts and connector/cabling specifications. The current high volume HPC and DataCenter installations are primarily using EDR 25.7G per lane interconnects. This is done using primarily a 4-lane option cable link between ToR switch and rack leaf server using the QSFP28 connector system. Although […]
New Gen-Z Interconnect Consortium launched
Gen-Z is a very new interconnect consortium that is focused on newer, advance memory, storage and accelerator architectures and devices. Gen-Z is based on the IEEE-802.3 physical layer specifications and external interconnects like SFP28 and QSFP28 connectors, cables and modules. Its first generation data transfer speed rate is 25Gbps per lane. 56GT/s and 112GT/s speed […]
What are Terapipe I/O compression connectors and cables?
Terapipe I/O compression connectors and cables were developed and used in very low volume ten years ago for a special very high frequency test instrumentation network that included Vector Network Analyzer and Bit-Error-Rate Equipment. These connectors and cable assemblies had to have a very clean SI design and performance, which meant having the minimum geometry […]
What are SAS 24G drive and backplane connectors?
SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) storage systems I/O interface and its data transmission rate and interconnect types are expanding again. SCSITA, the SCSI Trade Association, has been marketing, driving and supporting the next generation SAS 4.0 running at 24 Gbps full throughput per lane, though the actual data rate is 22.5 Gbps. The industry standards group […]
Considerations for modern industrial connector plug designs
Last week, we talked about how industrial connector plug designs evolved through the 1990s, growing ever smaller and more flashy in design. More recently, these modern industrial connector plug designs have been even more miniaturized and streamlined for lightweight, simple use. For example, during the 2000s, industrial design changed dramatically. Connectors shrunk another 20-30% to mostly […]
