Pericom shows 12G Redrivers at IDF 2013

September 2013 – At IDF 2013 in San Francisco, Pericom was showing their new high performance redriver chips that are enabling both the large format CE devices/Network devices and the active cable/expander marketplace. One of the themes at IDF this year were higher bandwidths for connectivity. The increase in images, video and other long run content is driving the recently changed connection speeds even higher.

These connections are both in the consumer product side and the IT/DataCenter/Server side. The interfaces moving up in speed are Thunderbolt 1.x moving to TB 2.0 which is a 10Gbps to 20Gbps shift. USB 3.0 to USB 3.1 which is a 5Gbps to 10Gbps jump, and SAS moving from 6Gbps to 12Gbps. These high speeds have major impact on the board designs for noise and SI, cable lengths that can be connected and length of the traces on the PCB for larger and larger industrial designs.

Pericom has addressed these current and future trends with a series of 8/10/12Gbps redriver products. At the booth they were discussing several of the products the lead of which was a new 12G driver that is for the SAS marketplace. The expanding data storage requirements has driven most of the data center community to move to 6G SAS controllers. As the data storage continues to increase and replication through unstructured data storage like Hadoop grow, this bandwidth is not sufficient and is moving to the new spec of 12G. The 12G data rate has significant SI issues for maintaining a low BER and is difficult to maintain in standard FR4 boards. The redriver chips just release allow these 12G products to maintain the current form factor of the 6G products, and support the higher data rate.

Pericom Video Redriver products

Similarly, as the USB3.0 market moves up from 5G along with HDMI 1.4 and DP 1.4, to the 10G level, the existing 8G redivers from Pericom can be replaced with their 10G products to support the new standards. With the use of the redrivers, existing designs can be easily retrofitted and future proofed. Even though the redrivers support up to 12Gbps, they can be used to enable the new Thunderbolt 2.0 spec of 20Gbps, as it is actually two lanes of 10Gbps, rather than a 20Gbps data path.

Pericom USB Redrivers

These high speed redrivers are being supported by similar high speed muxes that provide 2:1 and 4:1 selection and blocking at full data rate.  The products that are in production are available in 2013.