32G Multi-Protocol SerDes PHY Out the Gate

Hemant Dhulla, vice president and general manager of IP Cores at Rambus says that the newly announced 28G and 32G SerDes from Rambus “will be critical to 5G infrastructure, wireless base stations and remote radio heads, autonomous vehicles, data center optical switches and highly anticipated technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning inferencing, smart cities, and more. “By developing our high-speed interfaces on GLOBALFOUNDRIES 22nm FD-SOI (22FDX®) platform, we are able to deliver the high performance alongside reduced power and area required for these applications.”

The newly minted 32G Multi-protocol SerDes PHY is targeted at high-volume, high-performance applications including high-speed wireline, wireless 5G infrastructure and data center. Also, the Rambus SerDes PHY delivers data rates up to 32 Gbps and supports multiple standards including PCIe 4.0, JESD204B/C, CPRI, and Ethernet.

In an earlier Semiconductor Engineering blog, Mondeep Thiara, senior product manager at Rambus, wrote about high-speed SerDes protocols.  In that blog she said about the common public radio interface (CPRI) protocol, “SerDes design for CPRI application should have a very low TX clock jitter, a very low recovered clock jitter, low latency, and also an ultra-low latency variation. Special consideration and techniques are required to reduce the latency variation in SerDes in order to create an ideal interface for long reach networking applications.”

She also called attention to JESD204 noting in her blog, “the new revision of JESD204 standard increases the speed from JESD204B at 12.5Gbps to JESD204C at 32.5Gbps.”

Technical experts at Rambus state that the 28G and 32G Multi-protocol SerDes (MPS) PHY is designed with a system-oriented approach, taking the interface, interconnect and channel into account when optimizing performance and features to maximize flexibility in today’s most challenging system environments and applications.

Furthermore, they say “these comprehensive high-speed SerDes IP solutions are optimized for power and area in long-reach channels typical of communications, networking and data center applications — making this PHY ideal for challenging high-performance wireline and wireless infrastructure environments.”