Mellanox Technologies is showcasing a number of 100G technologies at this week’s OFC conference in San Francisco, including silicon photonics that more than double the speed of today’s 40 Gbps QSFP solutions. Feature demos include:
- 100G silicon photonics modules in the popular QSFP form factor providing 300% more density than CFP2 or C-PAK footprint solutions
- 100G VCSEL based solutions in the same QSFP package, the most popular pluggable form factor for 40G Ethernet applications
- Multi-channel 28Gbps VCSEL drivers and TIAs with integrated retiming
“High-performance data centers, Web 2.0, cloud and storage infrastructures will need to scale their 40Gb/s and 56Gb/s interconnect to 100Gb/s to address the exponential growth in data,” said Shai Cohen, COO at Mellanox Technologies. “The QSFP transceiver has provided excellent density for speeds up to 56Gb/s, but until now 100Gb/s technologies were only available in large form factors such as the CFP and CFP2. With silicon photonics, faster VCSELs and new electronics, we can squeeze multiple 100Gb/s technologies into the same QSFP form factor, supporting a wide range of applications with the same physical port. Our LinkX™ interconnect family has QSFP options for any data center reach – from less than 2 meters to more than 2 kilometers.”
“When the industry settled on the QSFP form factor for 40Gb/s, the market increased dramatically,” said Dale Murray, principal analyst at LightCounting Market Research. “That is not happening as quickly for 100Gb/s links in part because of the large size and variety of form factors. Data centers need low-cost, dense 100Gb/s ports in an industry standard form factor. The emergence of 100Gb/s in the QSFP form factor is an important innovation that will accelerate large scale data center deployments.”
