5 May 2003 Santa Clara, CA Lightwave - PMC-Sierra today introduced multi-gigabit serial link Retimer products, the PM8385 QuadPHY RT and PM8357 QuadPHY XR. The new product family is designed to resolve backplane transmission errors prevalent in high speed networking systems by recovering noisy serial input signals and re-transmitting them with boosted amplitude and reduced jitter.
The QuadPHY RT and QuadPHY XR complement field programmable gate-array (FPGA) and ASIC solutions by increasing high speed signal drive distance across backplanes resulting in a 50% increase in high-speed signal drive distance. In a typical backplane application, both FPGA and ASIC solutions with embedded serializer/deserializer (SERDES) have compromised signal integrity performance, which results in either poor bit-error-rate (BER) performance or restricts backplane distance to less than 10 inches. Using these Retimer devices, designers can extend link distance beyond 60 inches and achieve robust error free performance.
By leveraging PMC-Sierra's multi-gigabit serial I/O technology, the QuadPHY RT and QuadPHY XR deliver low power and standards-exceeding jitter performance. The QuadPHY RT is a standards-compliant, 4 port Gigabit Ethernet (GE), and 1 and 2-Gbit/sec Fibre Channel Retimer. The QuadPHY XR operates from 2.125 to 3.2 Gbits/sec supporting IEEE 802.3ae 10 GE and ANSI T11.2 10 GFC standard-compliant XAUI (10 Gigabit Attachment Unit Interface), InfiniBand, and OC-48 retiming channels. The QuadPHY RT and QuadPHY XR devices offer flexibility in optimizing several critical signal integrity parameters. In particular, both devices provide fine-tuning of pre-emphasis, equalization, output swing and termination through over 36 programmable settings to offset customer-specific backplane and interconnect losses.
With a total capacity of up to 20 Gbits/sec, the QuadPHY RT and QuadPHY XR devices provide customers with a high-speed, low cost alternative to optical fiber connections. The high bandwidth availability of the Retimer products enables customers to use low cost copper cables for data transfers from either shelf-to-shelf or rack-to-rack. These products have been qualified to transmit data error free over 20 m of InfiniBand 4X cabling exceeding industry standards of 15 m.
The PM8385 QuadPHY RT and PM8357 QuadPHY XR devices are packaged in small form factor 15x15 mm, 196-pin, and 1.0-mm ball pitch CABGA packages. The QuadPHY RT is priced at $21 and the QuadPHY XR is priced at $34 in direct purchase of 1,000 unit quantities.