FEBRUARY 3, 2009 -- Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (search for Vitesse) is helping system designers manage increased network bandwidth demands with the introduction of FlexEQ, a flexible, high-performance Electronic Dispersion Compensation (EDC) and Adaptive Equalization technology.
According to the company, FlexEQ is specifically designed to enable communication signals to travel farther, faster, and error-free without upgrading the installed base of connectors, backplanes, and cables. FlexEQ technology transports data at speeds ranging from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps and above. Being deployed today in Vitesse crosspoint, transceiver, and clock and data recovery devices, this technology will be an integral feature in similar products slated for introduction in 2009.
"As a leader in signal integrity solutions, Vitesse's FlexEQ-based transceivers are already shipping in volume production," notes Raymond Fontayne, senior manager of product marketing for Vitesse. "We are well positioned to take advantage of the expansion of network access bandwidth by continuing to anticipate the needs of today's designers of tomorrow's communications equipment for carrier, enterprise, and storage applications," he says. "Our FlexEQ technology is being successfully deployed by our customers, accelerating time-to-market for system speed and capacity upgrades on a multitude of systems."
Backplane performance
Carriers, service providers, and data centers are faced with pressures to reduce cost while meeting the rising bandwidth demands brought about by enhanced services delivered by cable, xDSL, FTTH, VoIP, IPTV, and wireless 3G/4G through the network. Vitesse says its FlexEQ technology has answered this critical market need by enabling bandwidth upgrades on existing backplanes, cables, and fiber. The backplane performance results utilizing Vitesse's CDR products show best-in-class performance at latest backplane speeds: 8-Gbps to 10-Gbps serial links have been demonstrated over one meter of legacy backplane traces and multiple connectors, all originally designed to support 3G or lower data rates, claim company representatives.
Optical applications
FlexEQ technology solves the difficult implementation of the Long
Reach Multimode (LRM) specification in the IEEE P802.3aq 10GBASE-LRM standard. Vitesse claims it has the industry's most widely used LRM EDC, and now with FlexEQ, the company says it offers the only option capable of meeting the difficult technical challenge of extending the use of currently deployed multimode fiber originally designed for 1 Gbps data transmission in the Enterprise to 10 Gbps. In fact, Vitesse provides the only device on the market that meets the original 300 meter target length of the standard, contend company representatives.
Long-reach SMF applications
Ideal for 10 Gigabit Ethernet and SONET/SDH Carrier Ethernet and optical transport networks, Vitesse has incorporated FlexEQ into its single, low-power, CMOS-based CDR for long-reach SMF applications. When used for single receive path applications and in 300-pin modules, the production-ready CDR compensates for both SMF chromatic dispersion and polarization-mode dispersion in poor OSNR environments.
FlexEQ has been paired with Vitesse's VScope technology, which obtains accurate receive signal sampling superior to external probing methods. Post-equalizer scanning, made possible with VScope, delivers an unobstructed view of the internal IC signal compared to oscilloscopes that offer only an extrapolated view of signals from outside the chip, notes Vitesse. The combined FlexEQ and VScope technologies enable more accurate debug and faster system bring-up.
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