OIF members hit the ground running in 2022, launching six projects during the Q122 Technical and MA&E Committees Meeting, held virtually February 7-11. The new work includes four Common Electrical I/O (CEI) projects dedicated to 224G and two Common Management Interface Specification (CMIS) projects. In between project starts, member also held an OIF Working Group election.
The four new CEI projects include:
- CEI-224G-Extra Short Reach (XSR) Common Electrical On-Package Interface Project
- CEI-224G-Very Short Reach (VSR) Common Electrical Chip-to-Module Interface Project
- CEI-224G-Medium Reach (MR) Common Electrical Chip-to-Chip Interface Project
- CEI-224G-Long Reach (LR) Common Electrical Backplane and Copper Cable Interface Project.
These projects are the first to address the 224G generation of electrical interfaces. Along these lines, OIF membership also approved the publication of the 224G Framework Project white paper. Work began on the white paper in August 2020 (see "OIF launches CEI-224G Development Project").
“OIF’s CEI-224G framework project white paper provides a roadmap for the applications, challenges and projects needed to support new specifications and technologies – these four new projects will develop the Implementation Agreements to address that roadmap,” said Dave Stauffer, who works for Kandou Bus and is chair of the OIF Physical and Link Layer (PLL) Working Group.
Within the CMIS framework, OIF inaugurated a project to create supplemental specifications for Form-factor Specific Hardware Management (FSHM). The project will remedy the fact that CMIS has been adopted to manage future generations of SFP 112, SFP-DD/SFP-DD112, and QSFP 112, but doesn’t yet provide hardware management control for these form-factors. FSHM will define form-factor specific module hardware management registers in CMIS allocated page 05h.
OIF members also decided to begin work on CMIS Support for Host-Module Link Training. This effort will provide an optional out-of-band, protocol-agnostic management mechanism for optimizing link tuning and training.
Finally, on the election front, Stauffer was re-elected to serve a two-year term as chair of OIF’s PLL Working Group, a role he has performed since 2006.
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