System architects and design engineers are interested in bleeding-edge performance. In this new 112 Gbps PAM4 product demonstration, Samtec marries the SI Evaluation Kit for the new AcceleRate® HP high speed connector system with Alphawave’s AlphaCORE 112 Gbps PAM4 Long Reach Multi-Standard SERDES.
The test set-up emulates the real-world by routing differential pairs from the Alphawave SERDES through Samtec’s AcceleRate HP High-Performance Arrays. Matt Burns, Technical Marketing Manager at Samtec, walks us through the demo.
Data Channel
QPBRS-31 data travels from the SERDES through about one inch of an I-Tera MT-40 PCB, to a Samtec 70 GHz Bulls Eye® High-Performance Test system, located opposite the chip on the back of the board.
The signals travel through six inches of coaxial cable, to 1.85 mm precision RF connectors on the SI Evaluation board, and then through the 10 mm stack height AcceleRate HP mezzanine connectors.
The signals then exit the second PCB through 1.85 mm precision RF connectors, through 20” of coax cable, back through the 70 GHz Bulls Eye, and then they return to the SERDES.
Results
The results are impressive. We see a really good insertion loss, a BER of approximately e-10, and the eye diagram is wide-open. One of the benefits of the wide-open, clean channel is the equalization functionality on the Alphawave chipset does not have to be exercised as much as other channels.
These test results give designers confidence in the performance of AcceleRate HP at 112 Gbps PAM4 data rates.
This kind of performance is essential as the new PICMG COM-HPC specification utilizes ASP-versions of AcceleRate HP in next-gen high-performance compute modules.
Samtec offers a growing portfolio of easy-to-use SI Evaluation Kits for testing many of Samtec’s high-performance interconnect solutions. Please visit samtec.com/kits or e-mail us at KitsAndBoards@samtec.com for more information.
AcceleRate HP
AcceleRate HP is a 0.635 mm pitch array with a flexible open-pin-field design. The set is low-profile, from 5 mm to 10 mm stack heights, and standard in four rows with up to 400 total pins. The mating APM6 terminal and APF6 socket are data rate compatible with PCIe® 5.0 and 100 GbE, with a high-density pinout.
If you have questions about the product demonstration, please contact us at SIG@Samtec.com
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