MELLANOX DRIVES - PER DANIELSEN
Mellanox drives interconnects beyond 100 Gbps
Mellanox Technologies is already delivering 100GE services but, supported by ingenious silicon photonics technology, its interconnect solutions are now set to increase data centre efficiency further, Per Danielsen reports.
Today the Danish design centre is an essential part of Mellanox, which is the sole vendor that can deliver end-to-end solutions for short-range communication including adapters, switches, software and copper and optical cables. Other vendors have to rely on switching chips from Broadcom, but Mellanox has their own chips for switching, which can secure low power and low latency. Normally, when a small Danish tech-company is acquired by an international company it is scaled down or closed, which was the case when Intel acquired GIGA. In this case the Danish team was scaled up. But it is not possible to hire enough skilled IC-designers in Denmark, so Mellanox has recently opened a new design centre in Holland. Today Mellanox in Denmark has 29 IC designers employed, with 6 in placed in Holland, Beyond 100 Gbps Today the Danish team is working on next generation 100 Gbps implemented as 4x25 Gbps. At ECOC, in Valencia, Mellanox will demonstrate a 100 Gbps Ethernet solution. “100+ Gbps is on the way, but WDM is expensive today due to special selected lasers with a very low yield. Each laser must be mounted separately. It can be a very costly solution if you need 16 special selected lasers. Mellanox has an integrated platform, so it will not be more expensive to expand to 16 channels”, explains Henning Lysdal, Vice President of Active Interconnect Engineering. He continued “Today you can find 100 Gigabit multimode VCSEL solutions, but when moving toward Terabit, our solution seems more obvious. We are one of the few vendors on the market that has an
Per Danielsen
T oday, Mellanox can for even higher speeds due to an advanced silicon photonics optical interconnect technology. After two acquisitions, Israel- based Mellanox can not only deliver InfiniBand and Ethernet adapters and switches for servers and storage, but also deliver transceivers and active cables for short range communications in data centres. Mellanox has expanded their portfolio by acquiring Kotura, a developer of advanced silicon photonics optical interconnect technology for high-speed networking applications, and IPtronics in 2013. deliver up 100 Gigabit Ethernet, but the technology is ready IPtronics was founded by a number of former Intel employees, who was working on designing chips for long reach SONET and SDH systems. The background for the Intel design centre in Denmark was the acquisition of the Danish chip design house GIGA, who was designing chips for 10 Gbps optical transmission systems. Having left Intel, three former employees founded IPtronics, specialising in chips for short range communication. One of the first products from IPtronics was a 4x10 Gbps VCSEL driver for 40 Gbps Ethernet. It is still on the market and is still shipping very well; especially in China. The number of chips produced has now passed 10 million.
Wafer close up notch. (IPxx3X4)
internal silicon photonics fabric. Mellanox have all the critical technologies in-house, with chips customised to the specific solutions.” “100 Gbps is typical with 4 channels, but we are ready for next platform with up to 800 Gbps and beyond”, concludes Henning Lysdal. The chips are made in a BiCMOS process from ST Microelectronics, that has a transit frequency of 300 GHz. Bipolar technology has been demonstrated with transit frequencies up to 700 to 1000 GHz, so there is a roadmap for faster electronics. Another hidden advantage is that Mellenox is using the 1550 nm wavelengths, corresponding to the C-band in telecommunications system. The advantage of the C-band is that the wavelengths a placed closer than in the 1300 nm wavelength range. Mellanox has demonstrated more than 80 channels in the C-band. Multitude of technologies A data centre needs cables in various lengths. From a server to the top of the rack, a copper cable is sufficient up to 3
meters. For leaf connections up to 20-30 meters, optical cables can be used, while on longer distances WDM or parallel connections are necessary.
Mellanox can deliver all technologies using the
QSFP form factor; making is extreme simple to reconfigure the network if necessary. A Mellanox chip can also drive a cable up to several meters. About Mellanox Mellanox Technologies is a supplier of end-to-end InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect solutions and services for servers and storage. Mellanox interconnect solutions increase data centre efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency, delivering data faster to applications and unlocking system performance capability. Mellanox offers a choice of fast interconnect products: adapters, switches, software, cables and silicon that accelerate application runtime and maximize business results for a wide range of markets including high performance computing, enterprise data centres, Web 2.0, cloud, storage and financial services.
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ISSUE 5 | Q3 2015
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