Quellan Incorporated, a leader in low power analog noise cancellation ICs, has expanded its groundbreaking family of Lane Extender ICs to enable the industry's first Quad Small Form-factor Pluggable (QSFP) active cable. Quellan's QLx4000 series Lane Extenders combine a sophisticated 4-channel equalizer with integrated higher layer functionality that ensures full compliance with the QSFP specification. The chip may also be used in line cards, switches, blade servers and chassis.
"Cable weight and compute density have become exponentially critical in next generation data centers," said Joel Goergen, chief scientist at Force10 Networks. "Power consumption is a paramount issue, and the industry is devoid of low energy, small form factor solutions for this escalating problem. Quellan's new QSFP ready devices are an innovative answer to this massive problem."
Power consumption and density are paramount issues in data center economics. Today's cable interconnect conduits can exceed 12 feet in diameter and weigh up to three tons, while interconnect power consumption is heading toward megawatt levels. Data centers have traditionally utilized bulky, conduit locking cables and connectors or power hungry fiber optics - eroding data center efficiency.
Combining the industry's new high density QSFP connector with Quellan's Q:Active chip enables much longer, thinner copper cabling - eliminating the need to convert to power hungry fiber optics. The resultant "active cable" improves data center economics by reducing interconnect power by hundreds of kilowatts and makes room for thousands of additional server ports in the existing footprint.
"The new QSFP connector delivers a new level of performance and density to the data center," said Gourgen Oganessyan of Molex. "Putting Quellan inside solves the distance and cable thickness problem - yielding the ultimate solution for data center density and cost." "Extending copper on thinner gauge cable is critical meeting customer requirements for cable management, distance and bandwidth," said Lloyd Dickman, CTO for InfiniBand Products at QLogic. "Coupling Quellan's analog technology to QSFP delivers the additional benefit of higher density - a winning combination."
The QLx4800 will be available for sampling in Q3 2007.