Gennum Launches Infiniband Repeater for System Interconnects

(Product News, 15 Apr 2008)

Gennum Corp. has launched GN1406, said to be the industry's first re-timed repeater solution that integrates a clock and data recovery (CDR). The low power, four-channel device supports PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 and Infiniband and combines the Gennum ClearEdge CDR and high-gain equalization technologies. This enables the solution to achieve superior jitter performance at the same power consumption as traditional re-driver products.

Leveraging Gennum's low-cost, low-power CMOS capability, the GN1406 is a highly integrated 90nm solution capable of propagating error-free PCIe 2.0 signals at speeds of 5GT/s (gigatransfers per second) at distances of 30m in copper cable chassis-to-chassis interconnect applications, and over 60in of standard FR-4 in backplane applications.

Current solutions rely only on equalizers to compensate for the extreme channel losses, signal degradation, and the resulting jitter that can occur at high data rates and longer distances. The CDR-based solution from Gennum resets the jitter budget after equalization and greatly increases the robustness of the link, ensuring that downstream devices receive a low-jitter signal, independent of the amount of skew or other jitter contributors such as cross-talk.

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