Jim Nadolny, Samtec’s Principle SI and EMI Engineer, and Ramses Pierco, VP Of Engineering at BiFAST, review a joint Samtec/BiFAST demonstration at DesignCon 2017.
In this video, using a BiFAST duobinary transceiver, a 56 Gbps NRZ transmission was demonstrated through a Samtec Z-Ray® interposer. Jim and Ramses discuss the demo set-up and elaborate on the live NRZ eye diagram.
Overview of Duobinary
- Duobinary uses a simple transmitter (NRZ transmitter) and receiver architecture to achieve serial data rates up to 100 Gb/s at low power consumption.
- Duobinary is inherently compatible with NRZ in the BiFAST implementation. This means that NRZ transmission can be realized with at least half the data rate of the duobinary data rate across a certain channel.
- Duobinary can use a portion of the loss present in the channel to create the desired waveform, reducing the needed equalization.
- Since it only has three levels, duobinary is less prone to crosstalk compared to other advanced modulation formats like PAM4.
- The BiFAST technology is low power because it requires a very limited set of building blocks at the transmitter and receiver.
If you want to learn more about the fundamentals of duobinary, click here. And here’s a link to the BiFAST website.
Samtec Z-Ray® micro array interposers are ultra-low profile, high density, highly customizable interconnect solutions for board-to-board and cable-to-board applications.
Here’s a quick Z-Ray overview:
- Z-Ray® achieves a board height as low as 0.3 mm and up to 4 mm, making it easy to match specific design requirements
- Low 25 g normal force with .008″ contact deflection allows for simple assembly of high-density connector systems
- Solder ball versions provide a rigid, permanent connection on one side
- Array cable assembly (ZRDP Series) launches a high-speed copper cable from the Z-Ray®
- Routing traces within Z-Ray® allow for the pitch to be switched from top to bottom
- Full custom geometries to accommodate for existing system obstacles while still connecting the main board to the daughter card
If you want to learn more about Samtec Z-Ray click here. To learn more about Samtec FireFly, click here.