Product category: Communications ICs (Wired)
News Release from: National Semiconductor | Subject: DS25C400
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 19 September 2002
Serdes quadruples comms capacity
National Semiconductor has entered the multigigabit serdes market with the introduction of a best-in-class 2.5Gbit/s transceiver optimised for backplane, cable and fibre optical applications.
National Semiconductor has entered the multigigabit serialiser/deserialiser (serdes) market with the introduction of a best-in-class 2.5Gbit/s transceiver optimised for backplane, cable and fibre optical applications National's new four-channel serdes solution enables communications equipment vendors to quadruple the capacity of their existing platforms, preserving the investments of service providers and corporate customers
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 5 Jan 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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National's DS25C400 is a four-channel serdes especially designed to provide a highly robust and reliable 2.5Gbit/s per channel solution for backplane interconnect between line cards and switch cards in routers, switches, crossconnects and multiplexers.
It is ideal for existing FR4 backplanes designed for lower speeds, enabling huge cost savings and "as needed" capacity upgrades.
The Internet and communication infrastructure market has undergone tremendous changes recently with an emphasis on system costs and upgrade capabilities.
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"In today's market, many service providers and corporations prefer to add bandwidth by upgrading existing equipment rather than investing in a completely new platform", said Alan Hutton, marketing manager of the wired communications division at National in Europe.
"National's DS25C400, with low output jitter, high jitter tolerance, and pre-emphasis plus equalisation allows equipment makers to put 2.5Gbit/s through existing backplanes originally designed for lower speeds such as 622Mbit/s, quadrupling bandwidth capacity without a chassis redesign.
Now equipment vendors can offer their customers increased bandwidth by providing faster add-in cards instead of forcing customers to tear out their old system and buy an entirely new one".
Existing backplane and cable bandwidth limitations can create large amounts of inter-symbol interference (ISI) distortion unless costly materials and connectors are used.
The DS25C400's configurable transmitter pre-emphasis compensates for ISI even when driving cables up to 10-20m.
On the receiver end, the device's configurable equalisation and tight thresholds allow it to reliably recover data-even from signals with severe ISI distortion.
"A revolution in the backplane/chassis infrastructure is already upon us as we enter further into the information age", Hutton says.
Increasing bandwidth through maximisation of existing backplane investments is seen as critical.
This throughput is essentially the primary factor in determining the amount of bandwidth a system can deliver.
Power consumption of today's networking equipment is also a significant factor which tends to limit the density and hence capacity of the infrastructure.
Reducing the power within a high port count networking solution incorporating the DS25C400 serdes will enhance future switch equipment designs and as telecomms switches, networking switches/routers, DSLAMs and wireless basestations all have stringent data throughput needs within their systems, this can only be a significant advantage.
National's DS25C400 operates over the full -40 to +85C industrial temperature range.
The combination of low power (less than 2W typical with all channels driving and receiving 2.5Gbit/s) and thermally enhanced 324-ball PBGA package minimises thermal management and airflow issues.
Other features of National's DS25C400 include: flexible parallel bus interfaces to 1.8V-swing SSTL, HSTL or CMOS; on-chip pattern generator and error checker BIST support; hot plug protection; integrated termination resistors; on-chip 8b/10b encoder/decoder; comma detect flag for character alignment; and parallel loop back test mode.
The DS25C400 quad 2.5Gbit/s serialiser/deserialiser transceiver from National Semiconductor is sampling now.
Its evaluation board is also available today.
Volume production is expected in the first quarter of 2003.
Housed in a 324-ball thermally enhanced plastic ball grid array (TE-PBGA) package, it is priced at $58.45 each in quantities of 1000.
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