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MaxLinear Announces New Telluride PAM4 DSPs Optimized for 100G Applications

2019-09-18 | Return

CARLSBAD, CA – September 18, 2019 – MaxLinear, Inc.a leading provider of radio frequency (RF), analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits for the connected home, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multimarket applications, today announced the extension of its Telluride 100G per wavelength PAM4 DSP family with the availability of the MxL93515 and MxL93516, optimized for 100G applications. These 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 the MxL93512 and MxL93542 first-generation DSPs, the MxL93516 includes a monolithically integrated EA-EML laser driver.

The 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.”

Technical Details

The second-generation Telluride family of low-power, high-performance PAM4 DSP SoCs enable 100Gbps QSFP28 optical modules using 4*25G NRZ host interface to 1*100G PAM4 optical interface and SFP-DD optical modules using 2*50G PAM4 host interface to 1*100G PAM4 optical interface. The MxL93516 100G PAM4 DSP integrates an EA-EML driver with 1.8V PP SE swing. The MxL93515 offers a differential 800mV peak-to-peak swing for non EA-EML-based optics.

MaxLinear has engineered a very high-performance DSP engine in both the transmit and receive data paths. The resulting superior link-margin enables single-lane 100Gbps optical wavelength technology by mitigating many of the limitations of mass production optical components.

Source：https://www.maxlinear.com