Multi-Gb/s IC Provides High Bandwidth Connections To Ethernet

Tightly focused on a range of high bandwidth applications employing high performance interconnect protocols, such as for Fibre Channel, PCI-X, 10-Gb Ethernet and InfiniBand, the GQ-100 chip consists of four separate full duplex serializers/deserializers (SerDes), with each of the device's channels designed to transmit and receive serial data at rates of up to 3.125 Gbps. And by employing a dual speed mode, the transmitter and receiver for each channel is able to operate at different data rates-- serial data rates for the device include 1.0625, 1.25, 2.125, 2.5, an 3.125 Gbps.
The GQ-100 IC was designed using the firm's GigaBlaze integrated transceiver core technology-- in addition to transceivers, GigaBlaze also includes USB, DDR SDRAM, Rambus RAC, PCI-X, SCSI and HyperPHY cores-- and represents the first product in the firm's SpeedBlazer standard product family of multi-gigabit per second interfaces for use in Internet computing, networking, web-based storage, and other similar applications. The SpeedBlazer family, in turn, is part of the firm's SureConnex series of communications interfaces, which is said to embrace more than 120 ASIC interfaces.
Other features of the SpeedBlazer GQ-100 include 8B/10B encoder/decoder with bypass, operation using a single 2.5-V supply, low power dissipation (330 mW typ. per channel at 2.5 Gbps), four 10-bit wide parallel interfaces, and built-in self test (BIST). The chip comes housed in a 240-pin PBGA package.