Een zestal bedrijven komt deze week naar Hawaii om te praten over de standaardisering van 10-G Base T techniek: 10Gbit Ethernet over koper. Men werkt aan technologie waarmee met een CAT5 Ethernetkabel deze snelheden bereikt kunnen worden, in plaats van het aanleggen van glasvezel tot aan de werkplek. Het grote voordeel van deze techniek is het gebruik van een standaard kabel die al in veel bedrijven aanwezig is. Als alles goed gaat komt in januari volgend jaar een studiegroep in Vancouver bijeen voor de eerste aanzet tot een formele specificatie:
The IEEE's "call for interest" on 10-G Base T had been planned for next year, but sufficient interest emerged this fall to slate the November meeting. If all goes well, an official study group will meet in Vancouver in January to lay the groundwork for drafting a formal specification. It could take two to three years to reach final ratification.
Telang said the SolarFlare and Cicada approaches rely heavily on digital signal processing and leverage multiple-input, multiple-output [MIMO] techniques that Lucent Technologies is using in antenna arrays for 3G CDMA basestations. By contrast, he said, Mysticom and Accelerant take a more hybrid approach comprising DSP and analog techniques, with Accelerant tapping its serializer/deserializer technology. And Plato Labs relies more heavily on analog design.
The group is expected to debate whether Category 5 wiring is up to the task of carrying 10 Gbits/s, but that's just one aspect of the complex design effort. "This is not a single 'Aha!' problem. Five or six major innovations need to be done well and in concert," said George Zimmerman, founder and chief executive officer of SolarFlare.
The use of MIMO implies new ways to handle near, far and alien crosstalk as well as equalization. Designers will also need to craft great echo cancellation devices, multilevel pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM) capability and highly linear, high-bandwidth analog circuitry. "A fair amount of the signal processing is done in the analog domain," said Zimmerman.