Molex partners with Altera and Gennum to demo 100 Gbps enabling technology

OFC/NFOEC 2012, LISLE, USA: Molex Inc. will partner with Altera Corp. and Gennum Corp. to demonstrate interoperability of a 28 Gbps Very Short Reach (VSR) interconnect solution at OFC/NFOEC, March 6-8.

The companies are using this opportunity to illustrate their commitment to helping system engineers and manufacturers develop higher density and lower power optical networks. The demonstration will take place during the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) Interoperability 2012 – Enabling High-Speed Dynamic Services multi-vendor showcase in booth 713.

“By successfully demonstrating interoperability of a 28 Gbps system, Molex and its partners Altera and Gennum, are paving the way for next-generation, high-speed connectivity,” said Scott Sommers, group product manager, Molex. “This is a critical step in meeting the high-performance needs of future bandwidth-intensive communications systems.”

The demonstration will test the 28 Gbps transmission technology over 2km of singlemode fiber utilizing Molex’s silicon photonics based transceiver and zQSFP+ Interconnect System. The channel will include PRBS31 data at 28.05 Gbps within the Altera Stratix V GT FPGA, which is tailored to support the most bandwidth-intensive communications systems. The data is then transmitted over a Gennum VSR host channel with 12 dB of insertion loss, through a Molex zQSFP+ connector to Gennum clock and data recovery (CDR) integrated circuits.

The retimed outputs of the CDRs are transmitted to the Molex 1490nm 4x28G Optical Transceiver Module, which loops the optical data back to its receiver through 2km of singlemode fiber. In the receive direction, the data flow is in the reverse order through the cascaded blocks, ending at the PRBS31. The error checkers within the Altera FPGA will verify that the entire transmit and receive data path through the system is operating error free. An electrical data eye is shown on a Tektronix DSA8300 Digital Sampling Oscilloscope at one of the Gennum CDR outputs.

The zQSFP+ system from Molex supports next-generation 100 Gbps Ethernet and 100 Gbps InfiniBand* Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) applications with excellent thermal cooling, signal integrity (SI), electromagnetic interference (EMI) protection and the lowest power consumption in the industry.

Altera’s Stratix V FPGAs deliver the highest system bandwidth at the lowest power consumption, under 200mW per transceiver at 28 Gbps. Stratix V FPGAs support backplane, chip-to-optical module, and chip-to-chip applications through 28 Gbps transceivers, and up to 66 full-duplex 14.1 Gbps transceivers. The transceivers in Stratix V FPGAs provide the industry's highest system reliability and performance with the lowest jitter.

By resetting the jitter budgets within the module in both the transmit and receive directions, Gennum’s CDRs enable robust operation for new systems such as Nx25G active optical cables and 100GBASE-LR4/ER4 and OTU4 optical modules. In the transmit direction they provide laser drivers with very low-jitter signals, allowing clean, wide-open transmit eyes. In the receive direction they remove jitter from the recovered optical signals, promoting error-free reception by a downstream ASIC receiver on the host board. The GN2425 and GN2426 CDRs include equalization capability beyond that demanded of the new CEI-28G-VSR IA, providing a robust VSR link.