Aquantia sets new bar for 10GBASE-T market with industry’s highest performance 40nm PHY

MILPITAS, USA: Aquantia, the leading developer of mainstream 10GBASE-T PHY solutions, has achieved a performance breakthrough with its 40nm generation product platform, demonstrating 120-meter reach on a Category 6A cabling system in a data center environment. The company’s full portfolio of the industry’s highest-performing PHY chips includes quad, dual and single-port configurations.

Robust cable reach with margin above the standard 100-meter mark is important for accelerated adoption of 10GBASE-T technology. While others have set the 100-meter reach as their goal, Aquantia’s solution has established a new bar in performance.

Additional margin enhances the end-user experience and mainstreams the design for system OEMs. End-users benefit from the additional margin as it allows for variability in connectors, cable bends, etc. It also helps system OEMs to simplify their design and lowers their cost by allowing for generic magnetic, fewer PCB layers and overall enhanced reliability.

Aquantia partnered with Siemon to test its flagship 40nm 10GBASE-T PHYs across the wide range of copper cables typically deployed in enterprise and data centers. The tests were performed on cable configurations extending beyond the IEEE 802.3an standard of 55m on Cat 6 and 100m on Cat 6A and Cat 7, pushing the envelope to the maximum insertion loss defined by TIA standards.

The tests demonstrated the Aquantia 40nm 10GBASE-T PHY running error-free performance over a 120-meter Siemon Z-MAX Cat 6A channel, the maximum distance achieved so far in the industry for 10Gigabit Ethernet on copper.

“For Aquantia to extend the transmission distance of high performance Category 6A cabling to 120 meters is the ultimate evidence of the robustness and superiority of its 10GBASE-T architecture and its successful implementation in 40nm,” says John Siemon, CTO at Siemon.

“This is a further confirmation of the maturity of the 10GBASE-T industry and the lead taken by Aquantia as an outperforming silicon supplier. We are excited about working with Aquantia. Instead of shortening the distance over copper cabling in the Data Center and falling short of industry standard requirements, we are extending it while offering end-users greater design flexibility,” says Siemon.

Aquantia’s 40nm devices builds upon its disruptive, patent protected, Mixed-Mode Signal Processing architecture, which has the characteristics of both simplifying the Analog Front End (AFE) and reducing the size and complexity of the digital section of the chip by performing advanced Signal Processing in analog. The net result is lower power consumption and lower cost compared to competitive approaches.

Ramin Shirani, Aquantia vice president of engineering, said: “The superior linearity of our AFE along with our MMSP architecture are the cornerstones of our product offering and the reasons for this latest achievement. We are already working to break our own record as we have done in previous generations.”