Backplane Test

Description

The throughput of many racks of communication equipment is limited by the backplane bottleneck. Often the hardest part of a system to upgrade cost-effectively, there is a lot of effort going into squeezing more bandwidth out of legacy backplanes. This isn’t trivial, when some were designed for 1.5 Gb/s and are now expected to function with upgraded line cards at 3 or even 6 Gb/s. Effort is also going into 10 Gb/s and higher, mainly aimed at new rack installations. Pre-emphasis and equalization are frequently employed to overcome backplane frequency response effects.

Useful Links

6+ Gb/s & 11+ Gb/s Backplanes:
OIF CEI: http://www.oiforum.com/public/impagreements.html (document CEI-02.0)

10 Gb/s Ethernet over the backplane:
IEEE 802.3ap™: http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/3/ap/public/

Recommended Products

BERTScope™ S 12500B

BERTScope DPP Digital Pre-Emphasis Processor Interface

Option SSC: Spread Spectrum Clocking

BERTScope CRJ Variable Clock Recovery Jitter Spectrum Analyzer

BERTScope™ Differential ISI Test Board

Applications Literature

Integration Technologies for Pluggable Backplane Optical Interconnect System
Alexei L. Glebov, Michael G. Lee, Kishio Yokouchi • Fujitsu Laboratories of America
(First published by SPIE in Optical Engineering, Vol. 46, Iss. 1, 015403) • January 2007

Measurement Note: Using the XFI 'EQ Filter' to Equalize a Channel to Enable Eye
Measurements • FEB 2006

Measurements of Pre-Emphasis on Altera Stratix GX with the BERTScope 12500A • JUNE 2005

Anatomy of an Eye Diagram poster • OCT 2004 *