FCI Cable Assemblies Meet Interoperability Test Requirements
FCI announced that its SFP+ (Small Form-factor Pluggable +) copper cable assemblies successfully passed multi-vendor +interoperability testing at the SFP+ Direct Attach Copper Plugfest event sponsored by the Ethernet Alliance at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) in October 2009.
Multiple physical host (PHY), network interface card (NIC), and SFP+ direct attach cable suppliers participated at the plugfest. The test program consisted of three phases: verification of host transmitter output and compliance of each SFP+ cable assembly to the SFF-8431 specification; compliance verification of the receiver input signal with each cable and transmitter combination; and 10 Gigabit Ethernet BER (Bit-Error Rate) transmission tests where each cable was connected between all combinations of PHYs or NICs.
"The demonstrated ability of FCI's direct attach SFP+ copper cable assemblies to meet the compliance and interoperability testing requirements is a significant achievement," said Jim David, global product manager for High-Speed I/O products. "Users can be confident that our cable assemblies meet SFF-8431 performance requirements and in using FCI cables with equipment from multiple hardware vendors."
FCI's SFP+ interconnect system consists of connectors, EMI cages and copper cable assemblies that extend serial data rates up to10 Gb/s at the same linear port density as prior SFP systems. FCI offers surface-mount, pick-and-place-compatible SFP+ connectors, single and ganged cage options, as well as passive and actively-equalized copper cable assemblies. All cable assemblies include the EEPROM memory map capability as defined by the applicable SFF specification that allows for cable-to-system communication.
The SFP+ system supports 10 Gigabit Ethernet, 8Gb Fibre Channel (8G FC) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) cable links with system functionality as defined by the SFF-8431 and SFF-8461 specifications. SFP+ interconnects have been successfully deployed in data center, networking and high-performance computing applications.
