Burlington, Ont.-based Gennum Corp. this week demonstrated active copper cables using its 25-28Gb/s CDRs at the DesignCon 2012 Exhibition in Santa Clara, Calif.
The demonstration featured Gennum's GN2425 and GN2426 module clock and data recovery (CDR) integrated circuits communicating over a 6-meter copper cable operating at 25-28Gb/s.
"The link is comprised of host board traces, module board traces, a Molex zQSFP+ interconnect system and a 6-meter 26 AWG copper cable," said Gennum.
The cable alone has approximately 20dB of loss at the Nyquist data rate. Using Gennum's CDRs to transmit and receive the signal at either end of the cable, the link is able to operate at a bit-error-rate (BER) of less than 1E-15."
Gennum's GN2425 and GN2426 are designed to support 25-28Gb/s data streams for next-generation 100Gb/s fiber-optic modules, line cards and direct-attach copper cables using emerging module form factors such as 28G-QSFP+ and CFP2.
As global Internet traffic is expected to multiply over the coming years, significantly more bandwidth will be required, driving the need for large-scale network upgrades, the company said.