Molex, a leading global manufacturer of electronic solutions, has teamed with Innovium, a leading provider of networking switch solutions for data centers, to demonstrate a switch system design using Molex’s BiPass I/O technology with Innovium 12.8Tbps TERALYNX Switch ASIC at the OCP Global Summit.

The new switch system design offers better signal integrity, thermal management and simple manufacturability, providing the end customer a highly robust and resilient system.

With low-insertion-loss, BiPass I/O technology serves as a PCB alternative to enable efficient and reliable implementation of 56 and 112 Gbps PAM-4 protocols. The BiPass cable assembly routes signals directly from an ASIC chip in a switch to the server front-panel I/O without having to go through the printed circuit board between them.

Because the ASIC can be positioned farther back in the box, the BiPass solution allows for vertical orientation, providing greater port density. For further cost benefits, the BiPass solution reduces the number of board layers and eliminate the power cost and consumption of re-timers. From a thermal management perspective, the BiPass solution uses dual heatsinks, on the top and bottom of module, making cooling of 20W modules possible.

“By leveraging the combined capabilities of Innovium’s TERALYNX 12.8Tbps switch ASIC and Molex’s BiPass I/O technology, we are highlighting better performance and more operational efficiencies for our customer’s evolving data center needs,” said Chris Kapuscinski, global product manager, Molex. “The BiPass and Innovium demo shows that even at 112 Gbps, copper is still a viable and more economical option.”

“Customers are experiencing rapid bandwidth growth in their data centers driven by factors such as video, IP storage, 5G, AI and machine learning. Hence, they are adopting high radix switch systems based on Innovium’s highly scalable and innovative TERALYNX™ switch silicon,” said Amit Sanyal, vice president of product management and marketing at Innovium.

“We are excited to collaborate with Molex to demonstrate an innovative system design with Innovium’s industry-leading 12.8Tbps TERALYNX™ Switch and Molex’s BiPass I/O technology. The joint solution promises to offer customers an alternate system design with robust signal integrity and thermals.”

TERALYNX offers the world’s fastest 12.8 Terabits/sec throughput while delivering line-rate programmability, large on-chip buffers, breakthrough telemetry, and low-latency. TERALYNX supports 10GbE to 400GbE Ethernet and delivers 128 ports of 100GbE, 64 ports of 200GbE or 32 ports of 400GbE in a single device.

Innovium’s patented ground-up design in TERALYNX provides customers clear advantages in programmability, robust tunneling, low latency, power efficiency, and advanced analytics/telemetry that are essential for scale data-centers.