August 2010 – Aquantia, the leading developer of mainstream 10GBASE-T PHY solutions, announced today that it has achieved a performance breakthrough with its 40nm generation product platform, demonstrating 120 metre reach on a category 6A cabling system in a data centre environment. The company’s full portfolio of the industry’s highest performing PHY chips includes quad, dual and single-port configurations.
Robust cable reach, with margin above the standard 100 metre mark is important for accelerated adoption of 10GBASE-T technology. Whilst others have set the 100 metre reach as their goal, Aquantia’s solutions have established a new bar in performance. Additional margin enhances the end user experience and mainstreams the design for system OEMs. End users benefit from the additional margin, as it allows for variability in connectors, cable bends, etc. It also helps system OEMs to simplify their design and lowers their cost by allowing for generic magnetic, fewer PCB layers and overall enhanced reliability.
Aquantia partnered with Siemon to test its flagship 40nm 10GBASE-T PHYs across the wide range of copper cables typically deployed in enterprise and data centres. The tests were performed on cable configurations extending beyond the IEEE 802.3an standard of 55m on category 6 and 100m on category 6A and 7, pushing the envelope to the maximum insertion loss defined by TIA standards. The tests demonstrated the Aquantia 40nm 10GBASE-T PHY running error-free performance over a 120 metre Siemon Z-MAX® category 6A channel; the maximum distance achieved so far in the industry for 10 Gigabit Ethernet on copper.
“For Aquantia to extend the transmission distance of high performance category 6A cabling to 120 metres is the ultimate evidence of the robustness and superiority of its 10GBASE-T architecture and its successful implementation in 40nm,” says John Siemon, chief technology officer at Siemon. “This is a further confirmation of the maturity of the 10GBASE-T industry and the lead taken by Aquantia as an outperforming silicon supplier. We are excited about working with Aquantia. Instead of shortening the distance over copper cabling in the data centre and falling short of industry standard requirements, we are extending it, while offering end users greater design flexibility,” says Siemon.
Aquantia’s 40nm devices build upon its disruptive, patent protected, Mixed-Mode Signal Processing architecture, which has the characteristics of both simplifying the Analog Front End (AFE) and reducing the size and complexity of the digital section of the chip by performing advanced signal processing in analog. The net result is lower power consumption and lower cost, compared to competitive approaches. Ramin Shirani, Aquantia vice president of engineering, said “The superior linearity of our AFE along with our MMSP architecture are the cornerstones of our product offering and the reasons for this latest achievement. We are already working to break our own record as we have done in previous generations.”
Aquantia is currently sampling its full portfolio of 40nm 10GBASE-T PHYs, ranging from quad to single port configurations:
· AQ 1401 quad-port 10GBASE-T, for high density top of rack (ToR) and chassis-based switches
· AQ 1202: dual-port 10GBASE-T, for emerging LAN-on-motherboard server applications and stand-up NICs, CNAs and HBAs
· AQ 1103: single-port 10GBASE-T for single-port high end PC applications and X2 modules
Aquantia CEO and president, Faraj Aalaei states, “We are seeing great market momentum for 10GBASE-T with switch and server OEMs, following our recent achievements in the 40nm generation. A strong track record in innovation, expertise and a constant search for the highest performance are the drivers behind this success.”
Go to www.aquantia.com/news_videos.php for footage of recent Interop discussions on 10GE in the data centre, as well as additional footage on 10GBASE-T data centre trends, and follow Aquantia on Twitter for ongoing updates on 10Gigabit Ethernet connectivity in the data centre.
