Gigabit signals demand higher speed and higher density mezzanine connectors

摘要

Currently, digital signal speeds on PCBs are moving up to 5 Gbit/s, and signal speeds of up to 10 Gbit/s are expected to get into the designs the next few years. These trends are driving the need for enhanced backplane and mezzanine connector technologies to meet the signal-integrity requirements of these systems. The dramatic increase in bandwidth has impacted connector performance in terms of capacitance, crosstalk, impedance, inductance, and reflection. Several industry standards have bus structures based on high-speed lanes, or channels, using 2.5 to 3.187 Gbits/s per lane. These include 10G Ethernet (IEEE 802.3ak - CX4), InfiniBand, 10G Fibre Channel, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and Serial ATA2 (SATA-2). Consequendy, systems need high-performance connectors that not only meet higher electrical specifications, but also meet high-density requirements.