TE Connectivity (TE) will educate and inspire system designers at DesignCon 2020 by demonstrating an array of solutions for next-generation compute and networking systems. TE will showcase a variety of high-speed data communications connectivity solutions in booth 817 at the DesignCon 2020 expo on Jan. 28-30 in Santa Clara, California.

In addition, on Jan. 28 at 3:45 p.m. at the conference, TE technologist, industry standards manager and OIF president Nathan Tracy will be a guest speaker at the 112G OIF panel, "Enabling New Architectures: An Update on OIF's CEI-112G Electrical Interfaces."

Each year, the TE team demonstrates the company's leadership in compute and high-speed connectivity solutions at DesignCon. TE's featured live demos will include:

800G copper link | OSFP passive cable 

• The 112 Gbps direct attach copper (DAC) cable link will demonstrate a live 112 Gbps PAM-4 electrical signal running over two meters of passive copper cabling to include crosstalk aggressors. This channel will utilize a 112 Gbps PAM-4 SerDes chip driving and receiving traffic through the octal small form factor pluggable (OSFP) surface mount (SMT) connector, which is a pluggable form factor with eight high-speed electrical lanes. This demonstration will highlight the connector's ability to run each of these 8 lanes at 112 Gbps for a total aggregate data rate of 896 Gbps per connector over two meters of copper cable. With the OSFP form factor capable of allowing a density of up to 32 ports per 1 rack-unit (RU) front panel, this technology can enable 28.6 Tbps per 1RU.

100G Socketing | extra large array (XLA) dual compression socket

• TE's XLA sockets can provide high speed "LGA contact" signal performance. The growing size of large silicon packages has pushed the manufacturing of traditional plastic sockets beyond established molding limits. XLA sockets are a hybrid LGA socket technology that utilizes a PCB substrate carrier, allowing for reliable attachment to the motherboard via direct soldering. A key feature of XLA socket technology is its ability to address large packages, in excess of 100mm x 100mm. This demonstration presents live 56G PAM-4 signal performance over one channel with three aggressors.

100G STRADA Whisper backplane connections 

• The 100G STRADA Whisper absolute orthogonal link will demonstrate live 100 Gbps PAM-4 electrical signaling running over a +30dB channel with crosstalk aggressors. This channel utilizes an integrated 100G PAM-4 SerDes chip driving and receiving traffic through the STRADA Whisper absolute connector, a next-generation backplane style connector with backplane, orthogonal and cabled options. This demonstration will highlight the connector's ability to run 100 Gbps traffic through a realistic orthogonal channel with integrated active devices.

Co-Packaging socket technology

• TE developed socket technology that allows contact pitches down to 0.4mm with signal integrity aimed at developing OIF CEI-112G-XSR channel requirements. The use of these sockets allows replaceable optical engines during manufacturing of co-packaged optics and switch silicon. The co-packaging solution allows integration of TE's thermal bridge technology for thermal management of the optics while incorporating TE's XLA socket technology. This helps address the thermal challenges of multiple non-coplanar optical engines and can provide an existing separable solution for installation of the co-packaged optical and switching assembly onto host PCBs. The display at DesignCon will be a static mockup of a 25-Terabit co-packaged assembly.

5G RF | compressible connector

• The ERFV connector demo highlights TE's RF compression coax connector product, supporting 5G wireless designs by implementing massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) antenna and board-to-board and board-to-filter connections with reduced total solution costs. The ERFV connectors incorporated into an antenna filter unit will demonstrate signal integrity with excellent misalignment tolerance, and KPIs – insertion loss and return loss displayed at the vector network analyzer.

Thermal Bridge | improved thermal management

• The thermal bridge demo presents a technology for efficiently transferring heat across a gap of variable size, while controlling the force applied to surrounding components. The demo displays bridge and interface thermal resistances in real time, while allowing adjustment of the bridge height as heat is transferred between a heat source and cooling solution.

Learn more on TE's DesignCon 2020 events page.