NetworkingPoint2 Technology Accelerates Volume Deployments of Low-Power 400G Active Electrical Cables

Point2 Technology, a leading provider of high-performance, low-power connectivity solutions for cloud and 5G infrastructure, and Foxconn Interconnect Technology (FIT), an innovative market leader of connectivity technologies within data center, mobile, computing and IoT environments, today announced expanded production of Point2’s Active Electrical Cable (AEC). The solution reflects the increased demand for the company’s first 400GBASE-SR4 AEC based on its C-Tube™ technology and a proprietary PAM4 SoC.

“When Point2 announced the PT-QD20132 last month, we expected it would be readily adopted,” said Sean Park, CEO of Point2 Technology. “Interest has actually been much greater, and for us to accommodate the demand from cloud and enterprise customers—Point2 was encouraged by our customers to team up with market leaders, such as Foxconn Interconnect Technology, to accelerate volume deployments. This demonstrates our ability to quickly and smoothly meet the very high volume demand for AECs with high quality, innovative and cost effective solutions.”

“We believe this is because AECs have advantages over passive direct attach copper (DAC) and active optical cable (AOC) in short-reach applications. For example, they offer up to five times the reach in applications such as Base-SR4 400G, using about 80% less cable, with a 50% reduction in size, and 75% less power consumption than optical fiber cables,” Sean Park added.

Point2’s partnership with FIT demonstrates the ability to produce high performance interconnect solutions and offer a low cost, high-performance alternative to expensive AOCs and performance-limited DACs to proliferate 400G disaggregated chassis configurations at hyperscalers and service providers. The company will be able to get to production quickly because of Point2’s comprehensive reference design including the “paddle board” PCB, software and built-in self-test capabilities ideal for high quality volume manufacturing.

Unlike other AEC Ethernet solutions that do not include self-test capability, the PT-QD20132 has an integrated processor that provides access to Digital Diagnostic Monitoring (DMM) via the 2-wire QSFP management interface. This enables eye monitoring, PRBS pattern generation and checking, user-defined pattern generation, DC offset and phase calibration, eye and equalizer calibration, and loss of signal detection, without the need for external circuits. In addition, customization firmware can be downloaded to the PT-QD20132 to satisfy the needs of specific applications.

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