MaxLinear has announced the production availability of the Keystone family of DSPs, the industry’s first 5nm CMOS 800Gbps PAM4 DSP for hyperscale data center applications. Representing MaxLinear’s third generation of PAM4 DSPs, Keystone enables small form factors, offers high integration, best-in-class power consumption, and has the flexibility to address multiple optical and electrical interconnect use cases.
An ongoing surge in the use of cloud services to increase productivity and improve customer experiences underlies the growth of hyperscale data centers. According to Precedence Research, the global hyperscale data center market size is projected to reach approximately US$593B by 2030, up from an estimated US$62B in 2021. This massive increase in scale comes at an ever-increasing cost. Climate control measures are often more expensive, operationally, than running the compute. Further, heat removal systems usually have a large, detrimental carbon footprint. Low-power solutions are absolutely critical for these applications.
“With the exponential growth of data traffic within hyperscale cloud networks, the needed increase in interconnect bandwidth in those networks requires a range of lower-power, higher-density interconnect solutions that support the required higher data rates,” said Drew Guckenberger, Vice President of High-Speed Interconnect at MaxLinear. “The extremely low power consumption and small form factors of Keystone solutions enable both 7Watt 400G optical module designs and 13Watt 800G designs. Significantly, we are now also extending these power advantages to the Active Electrical Cable (AEC) market, providing best-in-class power consumption there as well. With the power advantages of 5nm CMOS technology, we are directly addressing our customers’ critical needs for low power, highly integrated, high performance interconnect solutions in next generation hyperscale cloud networks.”
The Keystone 5nm DSP family has been designed to address both 400G and 800G applications. Variants supporting single mode optics (EML and SiPh), multimode optics (VCSEL transceivers and AOCs) and Active Electrical Cables (AECs) are all available and can be paired with companion TIAs to provide complete solutions for our customers.
The Keystone family will be on display during the OFC Conference from March 7 – 9, 2023, booth 2207. Contact MaxLinear to schedule a briefing.
Technical Details About Keystone
The Keystone family’s host side interfaces support 25.78125/25.5625/53.125/106.25Gbps signaling per lane over VSR, MR, and LR host channels. The line side interfaces also support the same rates and are targeted for 100G/λ DR, FR, and LR applications. All devices provide extensive DSP functionality, including line-side transmitter digital pre-distortion (DPD), transmit pre-emphasis (TX FIR), receiver feed forward equalization (FFE) and a proprietary MLSE-Lite capability.
The Keystone DSP family (MxL9364x, MxL9368x) also includes a monolithically integrated single-ended driver ideally suited for optical transceiver module implementations using electro-absorption modulated lasers (EMLs). Additionally, it features an optional monolithically integrated high-swing differential driver that can be used for direct drive of silicon photonics (SiPh) based modulators providing swings up to 4Vpp. The following channel configurations are available in each case:
- 8x50G to 8x50G
- 8x50G to 4x100G
- 4x100G to 4x100G
- 8x100G to 8x100G
These DSPs offer exceptional performance and signal integrity in a compact (12mm x 13mm) footprint suitable for next generation optical module form-factors such as QSFP-DD800 and OSFP800 and are also offered as Known Good Die (KGD) for higher density applications, such as OSFP-XD.
