11 March 2014

Mellanox showcasing 100G QSFP solutions

In booth #3144 at the Optical Fiber Communications conference (OFC 2014) in San Francisco (11-13 March), Mellanox Technologies Ltd of Sunnyvale, CA, USA and Yokneam, Israel, a supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions for servers and storage systems, is demonstrating 100Gb/s technologies, including silicon photonics, that more than double the speed of existing 40Gb/s QSFP solutions.

Feature demonstrations include:

• 100Gb/s silicon photonics modules in the popular QSFP form factor, providing 300% more density than CFP2 or C-PAK footprint solutions;

• 100Gb/s vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL)-based solutions in the same QSFP package (the most popular pluggable form factor for 40G Ethernet applications); and

• multi-channel 28Gb/s VCSEL drivers and transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) with integrated retiming.

“High-performance data centers, Web 2.0, cloud and storage infrastructures will need to scale their 40Gb/s and 56Gb/s interconnect to 100Gb/s to address the exponential growth in data,” says chief operating officer Shai Cohen. “The QSFP transceiver has provided excellent density for speeds up to 56Gb/s, but until now 100Gb/s technologies were only available in large form factors such as the CFP and CFP2. With silicon photonics, faster VCSELs and new electronics, we can squeeze multiple 100Gb/s technologies into the same QSFP form factor, supporting a wide range of applications with the same physical port. Our LinkX interconnect family has QSFP options for any data-center reach - from less than 2m to more than 2km,” he adds.

“When the industry settled on the QSFP form factor for 40Gb/s, the market increased dramatically,” comments Dale Murray, principal analyst at LightCounting Market Research. “That is not happening as quickly for 100Gb/s links in part because of the large size and variety of form factors,” he adds. “Data centers need low-cost, dense 100Gb/s ports in an industry-standard form factor. The emergence of 100Gb/s in the QSFP form factor is an important innovation that will accelerate large-scale data-center deployments.”

At OFC, Mellanox is showcasing its comprehensive line of 10, 40, 56 and 100Gb/s LinkX cables, transceivers and ICs with innovations that improve the performance and return on investment (ROI) of data-center interconnects including the new 28Gb/s VCSEL driver and TIA chipsets, active optical cables (AOCs), optical transceivers, high-performance copper cables, quad to serial adapters, splitter cables and many other components to improve the performance and efficiency of the data center. Every LinkX cable and transceiver is cluster tested in a stressed, system environment, providing better out-of-the-box quality. Bit error rate (BER) testing ensures that each unit meets a BER of 10-15 for higher system performance with 1000 times fewer transmission errors than many competitive solutions.

Tags: QSFP silicon photonics

Visit: www.mellanox.com