February 9, 2011 - FCI, National Semiconductor and Agilent successfully demonstrated 25 Gb/s differential signal transmission over a backplane link at DesignCon 2011, held Jan. 31 - Feb. 3, 2011 in Santa Clara, California. The backplane demonstrator featured FCI's AirMax VSe backplane connector system, 28 Gb/s discrete quad-channel retimer technology by National Semiconductor, and 28 Gb/s pulse pattern generator from Agilent. The backplane link displayed excellent signal integrity with a clean output eye, zero bit errors and excellent jitter performance.
FCI's next-generation AirMax VSe connector provides users of its proven AirMax VS connector system with a migration path to higher data rates while preserving the pin assignment flexibility of an open pin field design. The connectors feature backwards mating-compatible interfaces to existing AirMax VS connectors with minimal changes to connector board footprints. The connectors combine FCI technologies for a shield-less design with no metallic plates and closely edge-coupled differential pairs with innovative design improvements to yield low loss and crosstalk.
"The connector and chip technologies to enable 25 Gb/s lanes over copper backplane links are essential to accomplish narrower 4 x 25 Gb/s implementations of 100 Gb/s links for Ethernet or Infiniband," said David Sideck, global market manager for high speed and power products at FCI. "Moving beyond 10 Gb/s lanes on the backplane will also enable next-generation data center equipment designs to increase backplane capacities to support growing front panel I/O bandwidth demands while significantly reducing the number of required high speed signal traces."
