MaxLinear announces PAM4 DSPs optimized for 100G

MaxLinear announced the extension of its Telluride 100G per wavelength PAM4 DSP family with the availability of the MxL93515 and MxL93516, optimized for 100G applications.

MaxLinear said its second-generation DSPs offer significantly lower power and smaller footprint, comfortably enabling sub-3.5W QSFP28 designs while also meeting the form factor needs of the smaller SFP-DD/DSFP optical modules. Like its first-generation DSPs, the MxL93516 includes a monolithically integrated EA-EML laser driver.

The new MxL93515 and MxL93516 also feature a comprehensive digital pre-distortion (DPD) engine in the transmit direction to compensate for laser non-linearity and to cancel packaging limitations that cause reflections and bandwidth degradation at these extremely high signal frequencies. This DPD engine combined with the integrated EA-EML laser driver make these DSPs ideally suited for uncooled EA-EML lasers offering a substantially lower cost model to compete against existing 100G PSM4/CWDM4/LR4.

All Telluride DSPs include an auto-adaptive signal enhancement engine that enables robust SNR and BER performance. The engine integrates a continuous time linear equalizer (CTLE), automatic gain control (AGC), a feed forward equalizer (FFE), and a decision feedback equalizer (DFE).

The MxL93515 and MxL93516 are available in a tiny 7mm x 8.5mm package that supports both 4x25Gbps NRZ (QSFP28) and 2x50Gbps (SFP-DD/DSFP) PAM4 signals on the electrical interface. The package includes either an integrated 1.8Vpp EA-EML laser driver or a differential output that supports an external silicon photonics driver.

“Following the spectacular success of our first-generation Telluride products, we optimized the power and cost of our second-generation devices to enable a new generation of 100G single lambda QSFP and SFP modules,” said Will Torgerson, Vice President and General Manager of MaxLinear’s High-Speed Interconnect Group. "Our second-generation Telluride DSPs combined with the need for fewer optical components will drive the cost per bit down across the industry and we anticipate single lambda 100G solutions to become a majority of the data center and front-haul deployments over the next 2-3 years.”

http://www.maxlinear.com/MxL93515