New-Tech Europe | November 2016 | Digital edition

Solving signal integrity problems at very high data rates

Lee Ritchey, Scott McMorrow & Kella Knack, Samtec

end products. The state of technology At the start of 21st century, providers of equipment for the Internet struggled to design large routers and switches containing backplanes and plug-in line cards that had long internal connections running at 3.125 Gb/s. The primary concern was how to manage loss in those long paths. Fast forward to 2016 and the picture has changed radically. Manufacturers of the semiconductors used in route processors and switch ICs have managed to engineer them so they operate at speeds as high as 32 Gb/s with a very high tolerance for loss along the signal paths. The ICs of 2001 could tolerate as little as 10 dB of loss in the signal path at 3.125 Gb/s. The ICs of 2016 can tolerate as much as 38 dB of loss at 32 Gb/s.

and very creative engineering efforts. Of course, the question arises as to why not just move to the next iteration of hardware technology? The answer to that question is very complicated. The next iteration of hardware technology is silicon photonics. It is not an easy process and making the move to it will require massive changes to the entire infrastructure including equipment, materials, and manufacturing processes. So, for the time being, we are stuck with tried and true PCB technology. And, for the next several years, we have to figure out how to make this technology work for us as long as possible. Or, more importantly, we need to figure out how we are going to get from here to there—how many ways and in which manner can existing hardware be “tweaked” to meet the escalating performance requirements of today’s

The good news about the Internet of Things (IoT) is that it demonstrates just how pervasive high-speed communication technology has become. Addressing software issues within the IoT is pretty straight forward-create some code that people can readily download to their hardware devices to maintain the operating integrity of their various communication devices. Addressing hardware issues is not so simple. Even experienced hardware developers are challenged in addressing these issues. Part of the problem is attributable to the nature of hardware technology itself. Printed circuit boards (PCBs) and the various other pieces of hardware associated with them have essentially “run out of gas”. Moreover, wringing the last ounce of performance capability out of these devices often requires unprecedented

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