Signal conditioners, highest performance at lowest power?

The new ICs are designed to combat signal impairments caused by insertion loss, jitter, reflections and crosstalk in high speed enterprise servers, routers and switches. The signal conditioners have been manufactured using TI's BiCMOS SiGe process technology and, according to TI, deliver the industry's highest signal reach performance, at less than 6mW per gigabit. "As transmission rates increase, signal integrity requirements become more stringent," said Linley Group senior analyst, Jag Bolaria. "Highly integrated asic and assp solutions with shrinking transistor geometries, lower voltage rails and lower output voltages further compound the problem, making systems more susceptible to random jitter and crosstalk interference. TI's new retimer and repeater products resolve these complex signal integrity impairments while consuming low power." The DS1xxDF410, DS1xxRT410 and DS100KRxxx range include are designed to be used to drive optical and direct attach passive copper cables in latency sensitive, front port line cards, while meeting SFF8431 (SFP+) specifications. They can also be used to compensate for loss and crosstalk in backplanes, and said to reduce gauge thickness in active copper cable assemblies. Offered as a pin compatible IC family, TI states that system designers can choose from repeaters (EQ and DE driver), retimers (EQ, CDR and DE driver), and advanced retimers (EQ, CDR, DFE and DE driver) to achieve the desired link performance and system cost without having to redesign their board. The ICs are sampling now, with volume production scheduled for late first quarter 2012.