Amphenol ICC Develops 112Gb/s Interconnect Technology with eTopus Products for High Speed IP Solutions

Sept 14, 2021 -- San Jose, CA, USA – Amphenol ICC, the global leader in connector technology, design and manufacturing, and eTopus Technology, a pioneer of ultra-high-speed ADC/DSP-based SerDes for wireline applications including data center, cloud, edge, and 5G base stations, today announced the development of a 112Gb/s interconnect technology built on their products. This combined solution is suited, but not limited to, high-speed communications, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and Industrial and Instrumentation applications. The interconnects use 112Gb/s four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) technology to pack the maximum possible bandwidth into each communication channel.

The bench setup demonstrated this solution with the eTopus 112Gb/s ePHY™ SerDes IP evaluation board (EVB), utilizing four transmit (TX) and receive (RX) pairs, connecting two of Amphenol’s 4-Pair backplane right-angle receptacles with a 1 meter ExaMAX2^® IO Assembly via Huber+Suhner connectors and cables. The total loss of the channel was 38 dB at 26.56 GHz, and the pinout was configured for worst-case crosstalk configuration using three near end crosstalk (NEXT) aggressors most adjacent to the victim pins in the connector. Pseudo-random bit stream (PRBS) data traffic is generated at the TX and FIR (finite impulse response). Conditioned signals are then sent through the eTopus breakout board and Amphenol’s interconnect. At the EVB RX, analog to digital converters (ADCs) digitize the incoming bit stream, fully adaptive digital signal processing (DSP) equalizes the signal levels, and finally the clock and data recovery (CDR) realizes the data stream. Pre-FEC (forward error correction) was lower than 9e-6 for the duration of the trade show, with estimated post-FEC BER reported as 1e-22.

Amphenol ICC is the world leader in highspeed backplane connectors and cables. The ExaMAX^® product family, introduced in 2014, is a market leader, with over 1 billion ExaMAX differential pairs sold and designed into leading edge companies across key markets such as server/storage, switch/routing, mobile and AI/machine learning. ExaMAX2 improves on ExaMAX by further reducing reflections, NEXT, and FEXT. ExaMAX2 has been optimized to function consistently over various demate conditions. The design is entirely backwards mate compatible with all previous ExaMAX generations and can support data rates from 1 Gb/s to at least 112G Gb/s. This flexibility allows designers to cost optimize the system based on specific performance requirements.

eTopus is a provider of serializer/deserializer (SerDes) IP for high-speed communications applications. The eTopus high-speed transceiver architecture substantially enhances system BER performance and CDR robustness while reducing system cost and power consumption for networking, storage, and 5G applications. Their industry-leading technology provides excellent BER for long reach applications, excellent post-FEC with minimal decision feedback equalizer (DFE) error propagation for medium to long reach with crosstalk, and low-latency FEC, suitable for AI types of interconnects.

Combining eTopus’ 112Gb/s ePHY advanced SerDes architecture with Amphenol’s ExaMAX2 with copper cable, the channel impairments induced correlated errors are minimized without observable bursty symbol errors. This characteristic is critical for the forward error correction (FEC) decoder to correctly recover any erroneous codeword and to reduce the frame loss rate even with a small FEC overhead (or a low coding gain with low latency) scheme to maintain data integrity at 112Gb/s operation.

“ExaMAX2 has been proven in many designs as a reliable solution for 112G speed application,” said David Jiang, Amphenol Global Product Manager for ExaMAX^® and ExaMEZZ^®. “We are very happy to work with eTopus and present this end-to-end demonstration to our customers. All selected ExaMAX2 parts are high-volume-production-ready. We are so proud that Amphenol is the first company that can provide multiple production-ready 112G high speed backplane connector solutions based on customer performance and cost requirements.”

“We are excited to work with an industry interconnect leader like Amphenol and validate their ExaMax2 connector and 1 meter copper cable with our 112Gb/s SerDes IP. This end-to-end demonstration provides a clear upgrade path for modular platforms to double the line card bandwidth from 12.8Tb/s to 25.6Tb/s with electrical signaling and their chassis dimension,” said Harry Chan, CEO of eTopus. “We are exceptionally pleased with the low bit error rates with no channel impairment concern when utilizing the new Amphenol connector with our latest 112G ePHY SerDes. Robust and reliable connections are critical to broad deployment of 112G copper connectivity.”

About eTopus Technology Inc.

eTopus is an innovator and technology leader in high performance, DSP-based, mixed-signal, ultra-high-speed semiconductor interconnect solutions. Our ultra-high-speed SerDes IP is adopted by global Tier-1 players to be used in networking, storage, 5G, and AI applications. eTopus is a VC-backed startup headquartered in the center of Silicon Valley where our innovations and advanced architectures are developed. Multiple locations are set up globally in USA, Europe and Greater China to provide sales, design and customer support. Our investors include SK Telecom, HK-X, corporate VCs, and cross-border funds. For more information, please visit eTopus.com

About Amphenol ICC

Amphenol ICC, a division of Amphenol Corporation, is a world leader in interconnect solutions for the Information, Communications and Commercial electronics markets. We are one of the world’s largest designers and manufacturers of electrical, electronic and fiber optic connectors and interconnect systems, antennas, sensors and sensor-based products and coaxial and high-speed specialty cable. Amphenol ICC has an expansive global presence in research and development, manufacturing, and sales. We design and manufacture a wide range of innovative connectors as well as cable assemblies for diverse applications including server, storage, data center, networking, industrial, business equipment and automotive.