The Great Gigabit Backplane Shootout Arrives!
10 Companies Answer A Baker's Dozen Questions To Shed Light On The Science, Technology, Economics, And Politics Of High-Speed Backplane Silicon.

The Questions

1. Has the recent carrier consolidation and the slower roll-out of higher-capacity transmission and switching technologies affected either the need for a 10+ Gbit/s SERDES backplane, or the market timeline for such products? View Responses
2. What role do standards for performance interoperability have in the SERDES backplane market? What are the most significant activities in this area, who are the players, and what is the anticipated timeline for useful results? View Responses
3. What are the primary line impairments, and design challenges faced by backplane designers? View Responses
4. What is the state of the art in channel modeling, and what does it tell us about choosing a particular approach to backplane and backplane transceiver design? View Responses
5. What is the most optimum technology for high-speed serial backplanes at multi-gigabit data rates - multi-level coding or binary signaling? View Responses
   Responses should address, but not be limited to:
   1. Which technology performs best under "real-world" line impairments and noise conditions?
   2. Which one creates the least self-induced NEXT and FEXT cross-talk?
   3. Which technology delivers the lowest "Watts- per-Gigabit" at 5, 10 Gbits/s and above?
6. What are the factors affecting performance limitations for SERDES and PAM, and what are the practical capacity limits for each technology. View Responses
7. Are there specific applications where one technology is clearly the better choice? View Responses
8. What is the most optimum equalization technique for copper media such as PCB traces and copper cables - transmit pre-emphasis or receive equalization, both, or something else? And do equalization requirements change depending on the line coding technique? View Responses
9. What equalization technologies are more suitable for an ASIC with large channels of SERDES or PAM channels? View Responses
10. Regardless of performance, which technology is most cost effective for a given application? Which technology produces the lowest cost solution, once electronics, connectors, materials, and manufacturing costs are factored in? View Responses
11. Would it be more cost-effective to employ improved materials and/or manufacturing processes to improve the electrical characteristics of backplanes to reduce the complexity, cost, and power consumption of the transceivers? View Responses
12. There will probably be a large market for upgrades of existing equipment, where faster line cards and switch fabrics are used to increase their capacity and intelligence. Are there any technical issues or types of line impairments that are most important considerations in these kinds of applications? Which technology is best suited for these retrofit designs, and why? View Responses
13. Is it too late for any SERDES technology to maintain its market share because optical backplanes are maturing so quickly? View Responses

• Some respondents offered additional comments beyond their answers to specific questions. View them here.

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