Innovative Interconnect Solutions in OCP OAI Chassis

Artificial Intelligence is advancing quickly, driving the development of a wide range of new hardware accelerators for Scale-up, Scale-out, High-Performance Computing, and more.

Samtec collaborates closely with customers and partners to develop innovative interconnect solutions tailored to real-world AI acceleration topologies. The OCP Open Accelerator Infrastructure, or OCP OAI, is one example.

Samtec has several solutions compatible with typical OCP OAI chassis implementations. Samtec’s Matt Burns walks us through an OCP OAI prototype system at the Samtec booth at SC25 in St. Louis.

In the display, we see three OCP OAI EXPs, or expansion ports, and two Universal Bus Boards, or UBBs.

Samtec mid-board optical transceivers and high-speed cable backplane solutions are essential to the design of these subsystems. 

First, we see a FireFly^TM OCP OAI EXP Module. It incorporates 16 FireFly optical transceivers with 1.6 Tbps aggregate throughput. The FireFly module is protocol-agnostic, supporting Ethernet, PCIe, and CXL over optics. 

It typically requires half the power of MSA-style optics, and a full OAI chassis can accommodate up to 8 FireFly OAI EXP Module cards. That’s 12.8 Tb of data.

The UBB incorporates eight Samtec ExaMAX^® backplane cable systems. This is Samtec Flyover^® technology, which extends signal reach and achieves next-gen speeds by routing the signal via ultra-low skew twinax cable instead of through lossy PCBs. 

Direct solder attach contacts optimize the signal path, further enhancing performance. ExaMAX supports 112 Gbps PAM4 applications.

The FireFly optical transceiver is Samtec’s ECUO product. Here are a few more details, if you’re interested: 

• Performance to 28 Gbps; 32 Gbps in development
• x4 and x12 designs
• OM3 or OM4 multi-mode fiber
• Variety of End 2 options and heat sinks for various cooling processes
• Extended Temperature FireFly™ with a -40 ºC to +85 ºC range for military and industrial applications (ETUO, ETMO)
• By the way, the ETMO is our Extreme Environment FireFly with parylene conformal coating for exposed mil/aero applications
• PCIe®-Over-Fiber optical cable systems transmit 3.0/4.0 data up to 100 m (PCUO); 5.0 data rate in development
• PCIe®-Over-Fiber adaptor card supports transparent and non-transparent bridging (PCOA)
• SI Evaluation kits are available

And here are some more details about the ExaMAX high-speed backplane system:

• Meets industry specifications such as PCI Express®, Intel OPI and VPI, SAS, SATA, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand™ and Ethernet
• Supports 64 Gbps PAM4 (32 Gbps NRZ) applications
• PCIe® 6.0/CXL™ 3.2 capable
• Exceeds OIF CEI-28G-LR specification for 28 Gbps standards
• 24 – 72 pair designs (4 and 6 pairs; 6, 8, 10 and 12 columns)
• Wafer design increases isolation for reduced crosstalk
• Press-fit tails provide a reliable electrical connection
• Here’s a full list of products
• SI Evaluation Kits are available