Gennum and Tyco to accelerate backplane comms

Tyco Electronics and Gennum Corporation have signed a two-year joint marketing agreement.

Tyco Electronics and Gennum Corporation have signed a two-year joint marketing agreement.

The agreement formalises marketing activities to be jointly undertaken by Tyco Electronics and Gennum to bring a high-speed serial backplane solution to the datacomms industry.

This joint marketing will include Tyco Electronics' new leading-edge high-speed interconnect products, and Gennum's new, advanced techniques in multi-gigabit data communications.

The two companies are working to use their respective technologies and products to increase the rate and reliability of multi-gigabit data transmission over circuit boards and copper cable, for customers' next generation networking equipment.

Tyco Electronics' Rob Rix, Director, Communications OEM's, stated: "The techniques that Gennum employs in their devices are representative of the paradigm shift in which multi-gigabit data transmission is being accomplished.

Semiconductor devices are being developed that partially compensate for the behaviour of the electrical interconnect that will allow system designers to drive faster and further.

The electrical interconnect, however, cannot be fully compensated for, and its' electrical behaviour will still be the limiting factor in system performance.

Our two companies are working together to optimise our respective products to maximise their synergistic performance".

"The complementary nature of our respective products provides a compelling solution for the difficult high-speed data transmission problem, especially at serial 10Gbit/s datarates", said Gary Beauchamp, Director, Datacom ICs, Gennum Corp.

For high-datarate transmission the loss in signal strength occurs rapidly and conventional technologies only allow the signal to travel a short distance, which is not practical for most backplanes.

The current industry solution to this limitation is to run multiple lower speed lines in parallel, which increases the backplane complexity.

Tyco Electronics connectors and Gennum ICs address this issue and will enable the design of large high-datarate serial backplanes.

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