OIF Publishes Interface Specs

FREMONT, Calif. -- The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) announced today that it has completed two Implementation Agreement (IAs) relating to Common Electrical I/O technology. The first, CEI 11G-LR, addresses 11 to 13 Gbps applications over backplanes. This IA responds to the industry’s move toward higher speed electrical signaling, driven by system vendors’ desire to quadruple the bandwidth of existing systems without increasing the number of backplane traces.

The second IA, CEI Protocol (CEI-P) is a new protocol designed for use with the fast electrical interfaces developed by the CEI project team. A key feature of this new protocol is the Forward Error Correction (FEC) capability, which is tolerant of burst errors and substantially improves the error rate performance of a link. The FEC has the capability to improve the channel’s bit error ratio by as much as 12 orders of magnitude.

“The CEI 11G-LR and CEI-P IAs complete the high speed electrical signaling work of the OIF Physical and Link Layer working group,” said Mike Lerer of Xilinx, and OIF Physical and Link Layer Working Group chair. “It is gratifying to see the interest from other industry forums and standards organizations in the OIF’s 6 and 11 Gbps electrical interface IAs.”

The two new agreements build upon the existing CEI IA published last quarter that addressed 6 Gbps short and long reach and 11 Gbps short reach applications. Together, these IA’s complete a two-year effort to increase system capacity and bandwidth by doubling and quadrupling the rate of electrical signaling between chips and over backplanes. In February 2005, eight OIF member companies successfully demonstrated interoperability of CEI electrical signaling running at 5 and 10 Gbps over backplanes at DesignCon 2005.

Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF)