OIF Focuses on Next Generation Interconnects

The OIF is planning to develop a Next Generation Interconnect Framework Document in 2012 that looks 5-8 years forward and identifies application spaces that may require industry consensus. A workshop, which was held last week in Cupertino, California, was attended and featured presentations by Brocade, Cisco, Ericsson, Finisar, Hewlett Packard, Infinera, Luxtera, Molex, TE Connectivity, Tellabs and Xilinx.


Members of the Physical and Link Layer Working Group proposed a 28G Medium Reach (MR) Common Electrical Interface (CEI) project to support chip-to-chip interfaces. It will build on the previous 28G CEI projects, including short reach and very short reach distances, all of which enable 100G applications. A low power medium reach chip-to-chip interface is needed to enable high density and lower power line-card designs. This project will facilitate increased channel density in carrier equipment and will specify operation of 1 to n lanes of data operating at up to 28Gbps over 0 to 500mm using one connector.


A second new project titled Generation 2.0 100G long-haul DWDM Transmission Module MSA was also started in the PLL Working Group. This project will be based on technical feasibility of smaller module size with reduced power consumption for the next generation 100G MSA. Shrinking the size of the current generation 1.0 100G MSA module and lowering the power dissipation will open the possibility of having multiple modules or cards in a system rack slot, leading to higher overall capacity of the system at a lower overall cost and will enable new applications.
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