7 March 2012

Vitesse and Molex demo 14G technology for data-center connectivity

In Corporate Village room 2157 at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exhibition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC 2012) in Los Angeles (6-8 March), Vitesse Semiconductor Corp of Camarillo, CA, USA (which designs and develops ICs for carrier and enterprise networks) and Molex Inc of Lisle, IL, USA (a manufacturer of electronic, electrical and fiber-optic interconnection systems) are giving a technology demonstration of energy-efficient 14G connectivity for cost-sensitive, high-density data-center applications.

Featuring Vitesse’s new VSC7224 quad adaptive channel extender and Molex's Fourteen Data Rate (FDR) quad small-form-factor (QSFP+) active optical cables (AOCs), the joint solution suits applications including switches, routers, host bus adapters, enterprise data centers, high-performance computing and storage.

Molex’s FDR QSFP+AOC is an integrated cable solution for less expensive, reliable transport for aggregated data rates of 56G, and distances of up to 4km per link. AOCs are said to offer the flexibility of lower total cost of ownership compared with traditional pluggable modules interfacing to system hosts via standard QSFP MSA connectors.

Vitesse’s VSC7224 is capable of re-timing or re-driving signals at what is claimed to be the widest data rate range up to 14.5G, and delivers power consumption as low as 100mW per channel. Featuring proprietary FlexEQ adaptive equalization technology, it can easily and adaptively compensate for signal degradation due to Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) and multi-channel crosstalk in the most challenging network environments, it is claimed.

Improving power consumption and thermal efficiency, link robustness and aggregate bandwidth connectivity are critical challenges for data centers, says Vitesse, claiming that the combined Molex-Vitesse solution solves these data-center issues at 20% lower power than competitive solutions. Capable of exceeding a data rate of 14Gb/s over extended reaches up to 4km, the devices are also electrically compliant with multiple protocols including: InfiniBand (SDR, DDR, QDR and FDR); Ethernet (10G and 40G); Fibre Channel (8GFC, 10GFC and 16GFC) and SAS (6G and 12G).

“The form factors and Molex’s silicon photonics technology provides customers the promised roadmap to speed, density and reliability,” says Adit Narasimha, manager of new product development for fiber-optic products at Molex. “FDR AOC solutions reduce overall data center power consumption, improve thermal efficiency and enable deployment of additional ports per system.”

“This solution provides a QSFP+ footprint for our customers to leverage a field-proven design and improve time to market,” says Vitesse’s product marketing manager Kinana Hussain. “Such connectivity solutions are pivotal to Vitesse’s goal of achieving robust signal integrity performance as carrier, enterprise and data-center networks migrate to higher data rates and port densities.”

Tags: Vitesse Molex

Visit: www.molex.com

Visit: www.vitesse.com