Abstract :
Summary form only given. In this talk we describe design trends in high-speed serial links from two complementary viewpoints. On one hand we have improvements of the channel through microwave engineering of the passive interconnects/backplanes, and on the other hand a trend toward increased sophistication of the serial link circuits, employing more and more of the communications techniques to compensate for the channel and noise. We describe recent breakthroughs in passive backplane design as well as give some predictions about the capacity of the typical backplane interconnect channels. By looking at the target interconnect applications, like 10-100Tb/s routers, it is clear that both the data rate and power have to improve by an order of magnitude each, to achieve the design goal with manageable physical dimensions of the system. This means an improvement of two orders in magnitude in energy cost per bit, from current designs. We believe that the emerging link design trends like multi-tone signaling and channel-and-circuit-aware coding have the promise to fulfil this task.
Keywords :
optical fibre networks; 10 to 100 Tbit/s; 10-100Tb/s router; backplane interconnect channel; channel improvement; channel-and-circuit-aware coding; communications technique; high-speed serial link; microwave engineering; multitone signaling; passive backplane; passive interconnect; serial link circuits; Backplanes; Circuit noise; Costs; Energy management; Integrated circuit interconnections; Microwave circuits; Microwave communication; Microwave theory and techniques; Power system interconnection; Power system management;
