Aquantia QuantrumStream Uses Copper for 100G Hyperscale

Aquantia, a developer of data center hardware including integrated circuits, semiconductors, complete data centers, and network switches has announced its release of the new QuantumStream data center interconnect that uses copper instead of fiber to reach 100 gigabit per second transmission speed.

The breakthrough here is that Aquantia and many other organizations believed that transmission speeds in copper mediums could only reach a much lower ceiling. The future of networking, where speeds reached and surpassed 1 Gbps, was to be only in the purview of fiber. Unfortunately for companies around the world, the use of fiber comes at a much higher cost than copper, so enterprises had to spend more to become leaders in their fields.

QuantrumStream proves that theory wrong. Yuval Bachar, an engineer at LinkedIn familiar with the construction of data centers, commented on this release in the official Aquantia announcement. He laid out the specific dollar figure companies have long held as a goal for a drop in the price of fiber-based interconnects.

“I have long believed that 100G connectivity would be widely deployed when it reaches a price point of one dollar per gigabit per second for optical interconnects,” Bachar began.

“Aquantia has come up with a very innovative 100G technology to deliver on lower cost per gigabit utilizing copper connectivity. Lower prices will transform the economics of in rack connectivity in hyper scale data centers, which obviously is of great interest to everyone looking to achieve below one dollar per 1Gbit/s on an accelerated path within the rack,” he continued.

Aquantia has made this possible though its partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES, which specializes in integrated circuits that are often used in switches, routers, and servers. The company was featured earlier this year in a partnership with SST.

This time around, GLOBALFOUNDRIES has offered its 56 Gbps data processing core that makes use of serializer-deserializer (SerDes) design. SerDes, a technique for transmitting data between interfaces, is critical to Aquantia’s success in developing QuantumStream. In return for its assistance, GLOBALFOUNDRIES will reportedly receive QuantumStream interconnects for use in its own integrated circuits. The partnership here should then provide an avenue for both hardware development companies to expand their sales due to industry-pushing speed, arrangements with existing customers, and global reach to new client bases.

Edited by Maurice Nagle