Serial transceiver ICs reduce power consumption

BitBlitz Communications Inc. has announced the availability of two 10Gbps serial transceiver chips that is claimed to replace two existing chips and consume 1.5W - one-fourth the power of previous solutions.

Designed to support OC-192 (SONET/SDH), 10GbE, and 10Gbps Fibre Channel PHY interfaces, the nPower BBTX100 and BBTX102 transceivers allow designers to quadruple the port density and bandwidth in routers, switches, and data storage equipment.

Both CMOS devices also make it possible to shrink optical transponders into the tight dimensions of emerging XENPAK, XPAK, X2, and XFP standards.

Believed to be the industry's first multiprotocol transceiver, the BBTX100 can be configured on-the-fly (via external pin) for either 10GbE or 10Gbps Fibre Channel, enabling designers to produce line cards and optical transponders that support both interfaces.

The full-duplex device can receive a 10.3Gbps to 10.6Gbps data stream from an optical interface and convert it into four 3.125Gbps to 3.18Gbps output serial streams.

The BBTX102 receives up to 10.7Gbps for forward-error correction from an OC-192 optical transceiver connected to a fiber-optic cable. It then performs extensive processing to convert the data into four lower speed serial streams (up to 3.223Gbps each), and outputs the data over an SFI-4.2 Phase 2 interface.

Data streams from both chips can be converted by conventional transceivers into the parallel data that feed a MAC, network processor, or switch fabric.

The transceivers contain an equalizer that compensates for signal losses to increase the transmission distance. They also have a 64B/66B-gearbox descrambler that feeds the data into a byte alignment unit. The BBTX100 also has an on-chip clock synthesis that allows the use of 156.25MHz (10GbE) or 159.375MHz (10Gbps Fibre Channel) clock reference.

Both devices are available in a 192 BGA package with either a 12-by-12mm or 17-by-17mm footprint. The BBTX100 and the BBTX102 are priced at $250 and $280, respectively, in quantities of 10,000.