News Article
Mellanox's silicon photonics speeds up communication
The firm says its technology dramatically improves density and reduces power to enable future 100Gb/s interconnected data centres
MellanoxTechnologies has announced the demonstration of its 100Gb/s technologies that it claims more than double the speed of today's 40Gb/s QSFP solutions.
Demonstrations will take place during the Optical Fibre Communications (OFC) conference in Mellanox's booth #3144 at the Moscone Convention Centre in San Francisco, CA from March 11th to 13th, 2014.
Mellanox says its feature demos will include:
- 100Gb/s silicon photonics modules in the popular QSFP form factor providing 300 percent more density than CFP2 or C-PAK footprint solutions
-100Gb/s VCSEL based solutions in the same QSFP package, the its pluggable form factor for 40G Ethernet applications
-Multi-channel 28Gb/s VCSEL drivers and TIAs with integrated retiming
"High-performance data centres, 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 Shai Cohen, COO at Mellanox Technologies. "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 centre reach - from less than 2 metres to more than 2 kilometres."
"When the industry settled on the QSFP form factor for 40Gb/s, the market increased dramatically," adds 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. Data centres 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 centre deployments."
At the OFC conference, Mellanox will showcase its line of 10, 40, 56 and 100Gb/s LinkX cables, transceivers and ICs with innovations that improve the performance and ROI of data centre interconnects including the new 28Gb/s VCSEL driver and TIA chipsets, active optical cables, 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 centre.
Every LinkX cable and transceiver is cluster tested in a stressed, system environment, providing better out of the box quality. Mellanox says Bit Error Rate (BER) testing ensures that every unit meets a BER of 10(-15) for higher system performance with 1,000 times fewer transmission errors than many competitive solutions.
Demonstrations will take place during the Optical Fibre Communications (OFC) conference in Mellanox's booth #3144 at the Moscone Convention Centre in San Francisco, CA from March 11th to 13th, 2014.
Mellanox says its feature demos will include:
- 100Gb/s silicon photonics modules in the popular QSFP form factor providing 300 percent more density than CFP2 or C-PAK footprint solutions
-100Gb/s VCSEL based solutions in the same QSFP package, the its pluggable form factor for 40G Ethernet applications
-Multi-channel 28Gb/s VCSEL drivers and TIAs with integrated retiming
"High-performance data centres, 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 Shai Cohen, COO at Mellanox Technologies. "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 centre reach - from less than 2 metres to more than 2 kilometres."
"When the industry settled on the QSFP form factor for 40Gb/s, the market increased dramatically," adds 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. Data centres 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 centre deployments."
At the OFC conference, Mellanox will showcase its line of 10, 40, 56 and 100Gb/s LinkX cables, transceivers and ICs with innovations that improve the performance and ROI of data centre interconnects including the new 28Gb/s VCSEL driver and TIA chipsets, active optical cables, 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 centre.
Every LinkX cable and transceiver is cluster tested in a stressed, system environment, providing better out of the box quality. Mellanox says Bit Error Rate (BER) testing ensures that every unit meets a BER of 10(-15) for higher system performance with 1,000 times fewer transmission errors than many competitive solutions.
