* Vativ Technologies’ 10 Gig transceiver for UTP copper cables
Fabless semiconductor company Vativ Technologies this week introduced a 10 Gigabit Ethernet transceiver for unshielded twisted pair wiring.
The transceiver, contained in a single chip, is pre-standard, since the IEEE is not expected to reach a standard in this area until around the middle of next year. The group working on the standard, the 802.3an Task Force, held a meeting earlier this month and worked through additions and changes to Draft 1.4.
Vativ is pitching its transceiver as a way for vendors to get this capability into mass production in network interface cards, switches and servers by the third quarter of this year. Potential applications would be 10 Gigabit Ethernet LAN backbones, connections for stackable switches, and high-speed links for servers.
Vativ says the cost, at $135 in large quantities, would be one-tenth the cost of short-reach optics. Only samples of the chip are available today.
Like the upcoming standard, the chip would use Category 5E and Category 6 copper cables. The widely available RJ-45 connectors would also be used with it.
Current copper 10 Gig equipment uses the more cumbersome cables of InfiniBand, in accordance with the IEEE 10GBase-CX4 standard. Such connections have a short range, which is why they are mainly targeted for connections between switches in a data center, such as between stackables. Unshielded twisted pair is a more widely used and more flexible kind of wiring.
Vativ touts the transceiver’s forward error correction and echo and crosstalk cancellation algorithms to help clear any errors.
