This active product demonstration, of a connector system running at 56 Gbps PAM4, incorporates a Xilinx® Virtex® UltraScale+™ VCU 129 FPGA Evaluation Kit, and Samtec SI Evaluation boards with our new HSEC6 micro edge card connector.
The HSEC6 connector is a .6 mm pitch, micro-pitch, high-speed edge card connector. Ralph Page, Systems Architect at Samtec, explains the set-up and discusses the performance of the system.
Signal Path
The Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ FPGA is generating 2 bi-directional channels of QPRBS-31 signal data. These differential signals travel through the VCU-129 board to a Samtec Bulls Eye® High-Performance Test cable system. This demo is using a Samtec Bulls Eye BE40A, which is rated at 50GHz. Another Bulls Eye system, the BE70A, is rated to 70 GHz.
The signals travel from the BullsEye connector, through 30” of coaxial cable, to 2.40 mm precision RF connectors the Samtec HSEC6-DV SI Evaluation board.
The signals then travel about 30 mm in the board to the HSEC6 connector. The data travels through two adjacent pairs on the HSEC6 edge card connector, representing a real-life environment including cross talk, and then to mating card edge pads on the second HSEC6 SI evaluation board.
The two differential signals exit that board through 2.40 mm precision RF connectors, through another 30” of coax cables, and are received back to the Bulls Eye test cable system, on the VCU-129 board. The data routes back to and is recovered at the Virtex UltraScale + device.
Results
If we look at the slicer eye and the histogram we see the signals are wide-open, and we have excellent signal to noise ratio. There are zero errors transmitted during the course of the video. The pre-FEC bit error rate is 3 e -15, and will only increase (the demonstration was running just under one hour when this video was shot).
SI Evaluation Kits
This demonstration utilizes the Samtec HSEC6-DV SI Evaluation Kit. Samtec has a variety of Board-to-Board SI Evaluation Kits which provide system designers and SI engineers easy-to-use platforms for testing many of Samtec’s popular board-to-board connector products. Samtec’s HSEC6 is a high-speed, rugged edge card connector system on .6 mm pitch. HSEC6 incorporates the Edge Rate® contact system.
HSEC6 Micro Edge Card Connector
The HSEC6 micro edge card connector is the GEN Z connector that complies with SFF-TA-1002 mechanical standards, and is PCIe Gen 5 compatible. HSEC6 is designed for a variety of applications, including AI platforms, FPGA, GPU, and CPU accelerator cards, servers, storage, networking, test and measurement, and wired and wireless communication, to name a few.
If you have questions about this demonstration, please contact us at SIG@samtec.com.
Here’s a link to another 56 Gbps PAM4 micro edge card connector demonstration, featuring the .8 mm pitch HSEC8.
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