Progress on Photonics and Servers
January 2011 – Sunnyvale, CA – In a recent interview with Inphi corporation, we had a chance to get an update on the marketplace and their product directions since their late 2010 IPO. The company is leading the pack on the high technology recovery with their Q4 ‘10 IPO. The fabless semiconductor company, which was founded in 2000, focuses on analog ICs for the memory, communications and networking marketplaces.
The server markets have rebounded and with that rebound, a strong support for the Inphi and JEDEC standard LRDIMM product. The high density memory controller allows servers to support a higher memory configuration than normal in the same footprint. These high performance servers, such as those with Intel Westmere processors, are currently unable to run at full memory allocations, and the standard DIMMs are not high enough density and the footprint does not allow for additional, at speed, memory sockets. These issues are addressed with LRDIMM. In addition to the new processor platform, the memory controller technology is being looked at support GPU based servers.
On the communication and networking front, the company is looking at the 100G ethernet market for 2011. The leading implementation of for the 100G signal to be comprised of 4 lanes of 25G all supporting the EEE (IEEE 802.3az) low power connection standard. Inphi has created a 28Gb/s transceivers with integtrated L1 and L2 cache for their PHY for this market. These blocks in combination with mux and dmux blocks will lead them in to thier Gen2 lower power and higher density products. There are currently targets for an ASIC with the transceiver PHY for production in 2012.
A new direction that is aimed at the high speed analog market is in Silicon Photonics. Thier expertise allows them to create high speed modulators that are also low power. For applications such as lightwire, these module systems need to be designed to not only handle the data rate, but also provide temperature stability. This is achieved not only by the design of the part and selection of the correct process technology, but also the package and test. As the IC included in the module is ususally not part of the BOM of the system, the selection and simulation of the design in combination with the package and the intended application.
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