LDA Technologies Pushes 100 Gbps+ Through Samtec AcceleRate® Cable
“Why do you accelerate so fast?”
In my youth, I had that question posed to me too many times by nice police officers. There is no right answer to that question. I may have thought, “I wanted to see how fast my car could go.” But you can’t tell the nice police officer that, right?
Why do I bring up this story? Sometime you try things just to see if you can do it. It’s not always what’s right, but it’s always fun as long as no one gets hurt. At least that’s what I told myself when I was younger and single.
Maybe there are better stories, but the point has hopefully has been made. (Disclaimer: Please don’t drive irresponsibly!)
100 Gbps+ AcceleRate Cable?
Yes, really. Samtec’s AcceleRate Cable is the industry’s slimmest cable system with direct-attach technology and ultra-low-skew twinax cable for 64 Gbps PAM4 (32 Gbps NRZ) speeds and PCIe® 6.0/CXL® 3.1 capability.
AcceleRate features an extremely slim 7.6 mm width and Eye Speed® ultra-low skew twinax cable with direct attach to the contacts. This eliminates the need and variability of a transition card for improved signal integrity.
The cable system also supports Samtec’s Flyover® technology to fly data over lossy PCB, simplifying board layout and extending signal reach.
64 Gbps PAM4? That’s All?
With all apologies to Sammy Hagar, Samtec never imagined 100 Gbps+ performance out of our AcceleRate Cable. The world-class engineers at LDA Technologies had different ideas.
LDA Technologies is a leading provider of high-end FPGA-oriented solutions optimized for ultra-low latency operation; targeted for data processing acceleration, high-performance computing, low-latency networking, and high-frequency trading. They have been a great Samtec partner and customer for years.
One of LDA’s latest solutions is the Orion HBM AMD Versal™ HBM FPGA board. The Orion HBM features the AMD Versal VH1582 FPGA chip with the fastest speed grades. The aggregate bandwidth of the Orion HBM approaches 9 Tbps. Orion HBM is ideally suited for ultra-high-performance applications such as complex simulations, HFT, programmable networking, cryptography, and data centers.
The astute observer will notice nine 0.635 mm Pitch AcceleRate Slim Sockets for ARC6 Series on board the Orion HBM card. These nine ports offer connectivity for 8 bidirectional SerDes channels each, giving I/O cards access to a total of 84 transceivers on the FPGA. Users can design applications tailored to their I/O requirements by creating combinations of the various transceivers with the appropriate port.
As an exmaple, the LDA OSC-DD2 I/O card pictured below offers 2x QSFP-DD ports. These can attach directly to the Orion HBM card via Samtec’s AcceleRate Cables. What type of performance is available?
Similar to Samtec, LDA works with their end market customers to optimize their solutions for the best performance possible. Given the tweaks LDA can make, achieving 100 Gbps+ performance from the Orion HBM card to the 2x QSFP-DD ports via the AcceleRate Cables is reality. Check out the BER data below.
For More Information
For more details on this specific demo, please contact our friends at LDA Technologies via e-mail at [email protected].
To learn more about Samtec’s high-performance cable solutions, please contact our technical experts at [email protected] or visit our high speed cable landing page.
