Copper fights back at 800Gbit/s in the data centre
Spectra7 Microsystems is demonstrating a chip that allows 800Gbit/s links over copper rather than fibre optic cables.
The GC1122 GaugeChanger chip compensates for 112Gbps PAM4 signal loss over 4.5m of 30AWG high-speed twin-ax cable.
As the industry moves to 800Gbit/s high speed links it will adopt 112Gbps PAM4 per lane signaling over 8 lanes. At these signal rates, traditional passive copper cables struggle to reach beyond 1.5 meters, which creates huge problems for data centre operators that need longer lengths to serve both switch-to-switch and switch-to-server connections.
Active Copper Cables (ACCs) enabled with the GC1122 extend copper cable reach 2.5 times, up to 4.5 meters at a fraction of the cost of optics. ACCs using the Spectra7 technology will consume only 200mW of power per channel, which is up to 12 times lower power than optical links.
The GC1122 is packaged in an 2.7mm x 4.2mm chip scale package making it easily embeddable in even the smallest of connectors.
The GaugeChanger line extends the data rate from 56Gbps PAM4 to 112Gbps PAM4 per lane. Since the GC1122 is analogue and highly linear, dynamics such as line rate adjustment, multi-level signaling, intermittent line silence, transmit pre-emphasis or amplitude adjustment and receiver adaptivity are fully preserved.
“We are seeing strong interest from both US and China hyperscalers to get sample 400Gbps and 800Gbps cables that are enabled by our new GC1122 solution,” said Spectra7 CEO Raouf Halim. “Both we and our cable partners believe that 112Gbps PAM4 signaling will represent a significant acceleration in the growth and adoption of our ACC data centre interconnect technology.”
Spectra has been showing the copper link technology at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) in San Diego this week. It has also been showing the GaugeChanger GC2502 chip supporting 25 Gbps NRZ and 50 Gbps PAM-4 enabling new connector standards of 100, 200 and 400 Gbps. This is being demonstrated with Arista’s DCS-7280DR3-24 switch and Spirent test equipment.
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