National Semiconductor's 10 Gbps repeaters double signal conditioning performance at half the power

SANTA CLARA, USA: Extending its leadership in high-performance analog technology, National Semiconductor Corp. has announced three multi-channel PowerWise 10 Gbps repeaters that provide the industry's highest equalization gain (36 dB), consume half the power (55 mW/channel) and deliver twice the reach (20 meters over 24-AWG cable) of current industry solutions.

Powered by National's third-generation SiGe BiCMOS process, National's 10 Gbps repeater family extends interconnect reach and enables higher data bandwidth up to 10.3125 Gbps by performing both receive equalization and transmit de-emphasis to compensate for channel loss in data center and high-performance communication systems.

Target applications include high-speed active cable assemblies and FR-4 backplanes using serial protocols such as 10 GbE, Fibre Channel, XAUI, CPRI and Infiniband. The repeaters also support SAS/SATA out of band (OOB) signaling for storage applications.

The explosion of multimedia content on the Internet, cloud computing, and the advent of multi-core virtualized servers are pushing interface bandwidth requirements in modern data center systems. However, interconnect length remains the same, posing power and signal integrity issues. National's signal conditioners embedded inside the active copper cable assemblies and backplane boards ensure signal integrity, reduce system power consumption and lower interconnect cost compared to optical alternatives.

National's 10 Gbps repeaters enable these active copper solutions to consume 4x lower power and 2x longer reach than competitive cabling solutions through the use of a new SiGe BiCMOS process, which produces high bandwidth and low noise transistors that enable low jitter and ultra-low power. The quad DS100BR410 is well-suited for high density connectors such as QSFP and CXP, while the DS100BR111 is designed for single lane SFP+ connectors.