16-port 50GbE PHY transceiver, do you know it?

What is a 16-port 50GbE PHY transceiver? What does it do? Marvell Corporation (NASDAQ: MRVL), a leader in storage, networking and connectivity semiconductor solutions, announces the Alaska® C Series of high-speed Ethernet physical layer (PHY) transceivers. The latest product, the 88X7120, is designed to improve data center bandwidth and performance. The emergence of new applications such as artificial intelligence and machine learning continues to drive exponential growth in the demand for processing power and I/O bandwidth in data centers.

The launch of Marvell's new transceivers is specifically designed to solve the upgrade of ultra-large-scale data centers from 25 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 100GbE to 50GbE, 200GbE and 400GbE. 88X7120 uses 50G PAM4 signaling and supports 16 50GbE ports, 4 200GbE ports and 2 400GbE ports, which can meet the I/O speed requirements of ultra-large-scale data centers.

Marvell can provide a variety of products for data center applications. PHY is the backbone of high-speed data center interconnection and an important part of Marvell's strategy. The addition of new transceivers, along with Marvell's switch portfolio and other products optimized for the data center market, provide scalable interconnect speeds to cost-effectively meet I/O throughput requirements .

The new transceiver is also the first PHY device on the market to be fully compliant with the IEEE 802.3cd standard, which defines PAM4-based 50GbE port types. Port density on the 88X7120 is specifically optimized to support QSFP-DD (Quad Small Form Factor Pluggable - Double Density) and OSFP (Eight Channel Small Form Factor Pluggable) port types for 50GbE, 200GbE and 400GbE deployments. The new devices also feature "gearboxing" capabilities that enable conversion between PAM4 and NRZ port types, allowing for a smooth transition to newer Ethernet speeds while maintaining support for existing optical and ASIC I/O . The new devices feature a fully symmetrical architecture with long-reach SerDes on both system and line-side interfaces, enabling system design flexibility and supporting optical and direct-attached copper interconnects. The 88X7120 is sampling now to lead customers.

Chris Koopmans, executive vice president of networking and connectivity at Marvell, said: "To meet the rapidly growing bandwidth demands of today's hyperscale data centers, it is critical to increase data throughput to 50Gb per channel. Our next-generation PHY transceivers can provide the industry's highest performance solutions to help customers meet the expanding bandwidth demands of their next-generation networks."

"The continued growth of bandwidth in our data centers is driving the rapid adoption of higher I/O speeds to increase system density, bandwidth and performance," said Yuval Bachar, principal engineer, global infrastructure architecture and strategy, LinkedIn. "With the next generation of servers and switches Deployment, copper and fiber connections will expand from today's 25G copper signaling and 100G fiber connections to 50GbE, 200GbE and 400GbE, which will require new interconnect technologies to support the upgrade of hyperscale and mid-scale data centers."

Bob Wheeler, principal analyst for networking at The Linley Group, commented: "With this new PHY device, Marvell is quickly launching the 50G Ethernet ecosystem and demonstrating its continued commitment to the data center market. We expect that by 2019, the market will have a strong demand for compliance with the standard. The use of 50G servers will increase significantly, and Marvell is supporting high-density switches with twice the port density of competing solutions." The above is the analysis of the 16-port 50GbE PHY transceiver, I hope it can help you.