Report Title: High-speed interfaces: From copper to fiber, serial to parallel, 4G Fibre Channel to 100G Ethernet

Introduction

The high speed interface landscape is filled with standards. Just when companies have made their development investment in one interface, another standard comes along to limit their returns. The new standard typically doubles, quadruples or multiplies by ten the existing interface speed. But it can also be a new variant of an existing interface, complicating the market dynamics and diluting the TAM.

Fibre Channel users are going down the times-two speed route, embracing 4Gbps interfaces with 8Gbps interfaces in their sights. For the Enterprise, there are over half a dozen 10 Gigabit Ethernet standards, with five alone covering copper, single- and multi-mode fiber to distances from 20m to 10km. In 2007 two of these five will start shipping: the 10GBASE-T copper standard aimed at the data centre, and the 10GBASE-LRM multimode fibre standard for the building and campus.

High speed interfaces are mostly serial in nature but parallel channels over a single medium do exist, typically as a first design approach for more challenging designs. 10GBASE-LX4 for the Enterprise is one example: it uses wavelength division multiplexing to pack four channels over a fiber.

Such parallel designs are the interface of choice until serial designs can catch up. And once they do, the original design rarely disappears. Predicting the life cycle of the interface standards is complex. But for those players that know how to navigate such transitions it is also an opportunity.

For the most challenging high speed short distance interfaces, multiple media links are used. Parallel optics is one example. Here data is transmitted across 4 or 12 fibres.

By contrast, the 40Gbps standard adopted a serial approach but now is adding a parallel channel version in the guise of the x40 MSA to exploit the economies of scale of 10G optics. Longer term, the severe challenge posed by 100Gbps Ethernet standard will mostly likely start by adopting a parallel channel implementation.

Report Outline

LightCounting’s first Technology Review report will address the high-speed interface market covering datacom and telecom. From the LAN to the WAN, the report will address copper and fibre interfaces ranging in speed from 4Gbps to 100Gbps; from short range parallel optics – POP4 and SNAP12 - to 10Gbps and emerging 100G Ethernet standards, as well as the 4, 8 and 10G Fibre Channel standards.

The comprehensive report will answer :

• The relative pace of development of copper, serial and parallel interfaces
• The emerging bottlenecks in the network, from line cards to long-haul links
• Transceiver form-factor road maps for the various markets and their cost trends
• The transceiver suppliers, the range of their interface portfolios and their strategies.
• The interface speed and linecard density road maps of the equipment vendors, including client side and line side interfaces.
• Emerging high speed interfaces
  • For the LAN and WAN, such as 40Gbps and the emerging for 100Gbps Ethernet, and where they will first be used.
  • Backplane, line card developments and chip-to-chip copper and optical interface.
• The market opportunities for the different interface classes:
  • 10G Ethernet
  • Fibre Channel
  • 40Gbps
  • Parallel optics

Target audience

Sales/ marketing professionals addressing the datacom and telecom markets, executives developing business strategies, and the investment community interested in copper and optical high speed interface opportunities.