May 8 2008
GigOptix, the leading provider of electronic engines for the optically connected digital world, today announced that the HXR4104, a 4x10.3Gbps Transimpedance Limiting Amplifier (TIA/LA) and the HXT4104, the industry's lowest power 4x10.3Gbps Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VSCEL) driver are available now as a chipset.
The HXR/T4104 chipset simplifies system design by being fully programmable via an industry standard 2-wire interface. This enables control of signal peaking, modulation and average currents in addition to providing access to temperature and output power monitoring on a channel by channel basis.
The parallel VCSEL driver will enable a new generation of low cost active cable products for High Performance Computing (HPC), Very Short Reach (VSR) communication and consumer applications and is designed to be compatible with the Quad Small form Factor Pluggable (QSFP) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA.) Applications include IEEE 802.3ba (pre-standard) Ethernet transceivers, infiniband QDR transceiver, infiniband QDR active cables, and proprietary multi-channel optical modules.
Optical interconnect is the wave of the future for high bandwidth connections as copper reaches its limits. At speeds beyond 10Gbps optical solutions are demanded, as they offer lower power dissipation with a compact size, and they eliminate the serious challenges of managing electro-magnetic interference (EMI) in sensitive systems.
“We already have customers evaluating and showing a lot of interest in the HXR/T4104 chipset as a replacement to our current generation of parallel products. Our new customers are also using the chipset for completely new application areas. They know we offer great performance devices based on our teams many years of experience shipping and continuously improving these products,” states Julie Tipton, vice president of marketing. “These devices prove the excellent performance of the new advanced process, and are the building blocks for 12 channel devices which we will be shipping, in volume, in Q4 this year.”
Samples of the HXT4104 and HXR4104 are available along with an evaluation board for easy evaluation. Production quantities are expected for shipment in Q4 2008. We invite customers to order samples now.
To speed time to market, the HXR/T4104 evaluation samples also serve as a platform to evaluate the identically performing, 12 channel devices, HXR/T4112, which will be available in production quantities in Q4 2008.