Elimination of these external QSFP+ Passive Copper

At Intel, we took a different approach. With the knowledge that many of our customers are designing low-latency ToR switches using DA copper cabling, we chose to embed high quality 10G PHYs within our Intel Ethernet series switch silicon. These PHYs can drive up to 7m of SFP+ DA copper on 10GbE ports or up to 5m of QSFP+ Passive Copper on 40GbE ports. With up to 72 10G SerDes on the, this eliminates up to 18 external quad PHY chips that must be used when lower quality SerDes are used within the switch ASIC. Elimination of these external PHYs saves cost, power and board area, which are critical in today’s large, flat data center installations. Because the electrical loopback module does not contain laser diodes, photodiodes, a laser driver, or transimpedance amplifier chips, it provides a more economical way to test QSFP+ Passive Copper during amp;D validation, production testing, and full system testing, Timbercon believes.In addition to the electrical loopback function, the QSFP/QSFP+ provides an MSA standard 2-wire serial communication interface to digital diagnostics and preloaded EEPROM two-page memory map.