56. 112. 224. SI/PI! For a lot of Americans, that sounds like the pre-snap play call or audible of a quarterback in North American-style football games. After watching football Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, that's where my brain is as well. However, for those of us in the high-speed connectivity industry, those numbers refer to the speed markers in channel data rates we work with everyday. An embedded engineer implementing a 56 Gbps PAM4 transceiver design. A mechanical engineer … [Read more...]
Search Results for: 224 Gbps
Nurturing Signal Integrity Expertise: Lessons from Back to School Season
As the back-to-school season kicks off, the excitement and anticipation in the air are great. Students of all ages are ready to embark on a new journey of learning, growth, and self-discovery. For signal integrity engineers and interconnect hardware engineers, this season serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of continued education in the ever-evolving world of technology. Just like students heading off from kindergarten to college, engineers too can benefit from embracing a mindset of … [Read more...]
Integral Ground Plane For Data Rate, Power, and Processing
Cutting-edge data rates have received much well-deserved press in the electronics media. New 56 and 112 Gbps PAM4 systems are in operation with verified, sustainable performance, and we’re on the doorstep of 224 Gbps PAM4. Having said that, the majority of Samtec customers don’t need these extreme data rates. For many designers and many applications, high speed, if it’s needed at all, is 10 Gbps or less. They need a reliable connector system capable of handling those slightly higher data … [Read more...]
Cutting Edge High-Speed Cable Performance Measured By The World’s First 53 GHz Scalable VNA
In this live demonstration from DesignCon 2023, the performance of a Samtec high-speed cable system is measured by the world’s first scalable VNA. Matt Burns (Technical Marketing Manager, Samtec), and Mike Resso (Signal Integrity Application Scientist, Keysight) explain the demo and equipment. The scalable VNA is Keysight's Digital Interconnect Test System, with 16 ports that are expandable to 32 ports at 53 GHz. In this demonstration, Mike has calibrated all 16 ports of the Keysight PXI-VNA … [Read more...]
OFC 2023: Samtec to Exhibit New High-Speed Interconnects
One (of many) benefits of living in a post-COVID world is a return to normal schedule. It's so much fun to see the latest block buster (Go see Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania!) in the move theater. Many people look forward to traveling (mostly) without any restrictions. It's almost like 2019 again! Another part of professional life returning to normal is the scheduling of high-tech trade shows. Earlier this month, DesignCon 2023 returned to its normally scheduled time. March 2023 sees the … [Read more...]
New Alignment Features Ensure Precision Alignment in Test & Measurement Applications
Samtec has developed an innovative, yet easy-to-use alignment technique for ensuring peak connector performance of precision, high-frequency compression mount connectors in test and measurement applications. The following explains the trend we were seeing and outlines the solution we developed to the common alignment challenge that was occurring. The Problem As data rates continue to push upward (224 Gbps PAM4) the need for precision, higher frequency compression mount test … [Read more...]
The Future of High-Speed Interconnections
How fast is too fast? In the world of high-performance computing, data centers, artificial intelligence and related topics, the answer is always the same. How fast can we go? Theoretically, I guess the fastest is the speed of light. In reality, data can travel at about 112 Gbps PAM4 right now with 224 Gbps data rates coming. This topic was all the rage at DesignCon 2023 last week in Santa Clara, CA. A quick search of the technical papers submitted shows at least six technical sessions … [Read more...]
Why Did PCIe 6.0 Adopt PAM4? There Are Many Reasons.
Samtec is a proud member of the PCI-SIG® community, and we have been for many years. In conjunction with our friends at PCI-SIG, Jignesh Shah, Senior System Architect at Samtec, discusses PAM4 encoding, which is a new feature of the PCIe® 6.0 specification. New: The PCIe® 6.0 Specification In early 2022, PCI-SIG® released the full version of the PCI Express® (PCIe®) 6.0 specification. As with previous versions, the latest version doubles the data rate of the PCIe 5.0 specification and … [Read more...]
New Signal Integrity Handbook Explains Fundamentals
I recently audited a Signal Integrity (SI) class, and as a non Engineer I found it to be extremely challenging. In layman's terms, Signal Integrity is securing the signal connection path from point A to point B. From there understanding SI basics like impedance, insertion loss, and crosstalk, are critical to an optimized system design. Luckily Samtec's newly updated Signal Integrity Handbook and our SI experts are ready to support your engineering challenges! Getting the basics with the … [Read more...]
DesignCon 23 or Super Bowl LVII?
We are preparing to head out west for one of the biggest showdowns of the year. Competitors have been preparing since the spring of 2022 for this meeting. The final countdown is upon us! We will see if all the preparations, the workouts, and the toning of muscles will pay off. Are we talking about Super Bowl LVII or DesignCon 23? We bloggers will make reference to pop culture, sporting events, and other random trivia from time to time. Since you are here on Samtec's blog you have probably … [Read more...]