OIF Demos Electrical InterfaceOIF Demos Electrical Interface

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) announced today that a complete CEI 11G-LR and 11G-SR demonstration including optical and electrical signaling has been added to the Common Electrical I/O (CEI) demonstration at DesignCon 2005 this week. OIF Member companies AMCC and Bookham join the other participating members, which include Altera, Interconnect Technologies (A Northrop Grumman company), Molex®, Tyco Electronics, Vitesse and Xilinx. Member companies Agilent Technologies Inc. and Tektronix, Inc. have provided test equipment for the CEI demonstration. The public interoperability demonstration is being conducted at the OIF's DesignCon booth, # 907.

While the CEI electrical interfaces were recently tested in a private interoperability event, the CEI 11G short reach interface will be demonstrated as an input to an XFP optical module. This addition completes the demonstration of all of the CEI interfaces in implementations used by today's system designers.

"This is the final piece necessary to allow system designers to demonstrate a complete optical to electrical loop, representative of future implementations," said Karl Gass of Sandia National Laboratories, and OIF Physical Layer User Group chair. "Adding optical elements to the demonstration supports the OIF's goal to promote interoperability of optical networking technologies"

The electrical demonstration shows interoperability from 8 to 49 inches of transmission lines at 6G and 11G. Legacy-type materials and configurations as well as channels targeted at greenfield applications will be demonstrated at 6G, while the 11G interoperability channels are greenfield type applications including "improved FR-4 materials and backdrilled vias". The optical demonstration shows interoperability between XFP optical modules and silicon framing devices at speeds exceeding 10 Gbps over short-reach channels of up to 8 inches and one connector.

Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF)