[By NBC-1TV H. J Yook]Cortina Systems, Inc. (Cortina®), delivering innovative technologies that link people and networks worldwide, today announced the industry leading CS4224, a 16-port backplane PHY, and CS4221, a 10-port CDR, both supporting data rates up to 15Gbps. While keeping within a 15x15mm footprint, the CS4224 supports a wide operating frequency range of 1Gbps to 15Gbps and delivers equalization capability that significantly exceeds the requirements of industry standards such as 10GBase-KR and 40GBase-KR4. Both devices support the rates for all major high speed interconnect standards including 1GbE, 10GbE, 40GbE, 100GbE, Infiniband, Fibre Channel, SAS, SATA, OC-192, and SONET and are targeted to backplane equalization, cable driver, and other signal retiming applications.

“System vendors are looking for high performance and integration, while meeting power and size requirements,” said Scott Feller, director at Cortina Systems, Inc. “28nm technology allowed Cortina to develop a PHY with high feature integration while improving the performance and power. The device is designed with innovative power scaling which enables a competitive solution for applications ranging from simple CDR to high performance backplane equalization.”

“Performance, power and density, are all critical for system vendors developing today‘s high density data center, storage and HPC solutions and Cortina’s new 28nm products address all three factors,” commented Dale Murray, Principal Analyst at LightCounting, a leading optical communications market research company. “Designers also want to simplify layouts from their ASIC to their optic or copper ports. With equalization on both sides of the device, integrated crossbar switching and full standards compliance, these devices can drive most anything up to 15Gbps with high port count.”

The CS4224 PHY functionality supports sixteen links that can operate at up to 15G. The device has a wide operating frequency range covering 1GbE, 10GbE, 1G FC, 2G FC, 4G FC, 8G, 10G FC, 16G FC, Infiniband SDR, DDR, QDR and FDR, and CPRI Options 1 to 7. The device has an equalizer that exceeds the requirements for backplane standards such as 10/40GBase-KR/KR4 and copper cable specs such as 40GBase-CR4. The fully autonomous device does not require external processors to control the convergence or dynamic adaption of the dispersion compensation.

The CS224 includes an integrated 2x2 switch, eliminating the need for an external crossbar device for redundant backplane applications. The integrated switch functionality supports 1+1 protection switching and broadcast functionalities. The CS4224 has integrated AC coupling capacitors and supports reference clock free operation to reduce overall system BOM cost. The device also includes capabilities such as real time eye monitoring, PRBS generators and checkers, hardware interrupt, and GPIO pins for test and debug purposes.