Sixteen Ethernet Alliance members gathered last month at Ixia’s iSimCity in Santa Clara, California for an interoperability plugfest for products designed to support IEEE Std. 802.3baTM-2010, 40 and 100 Gbps Ethernet. This included test equipment, switches, routers, NICs, transceivers and cabling. The plugfest was assisted by the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL).
The Ethernet Alliance said plugfest participants were able to demonstrate effectively the interoperability of their products. Cables tested either met or exceeded IEEE Std. 802.3ba, and bit error ratio tests (BERT) were used in the transceiver and cable tests to verify link-level error-free operation within the requirements of IEEE Std. 802.3ba. Basic layer 3 traffic was used to verify system-level error-free operation.
Ixia provided 40 and 100 Gbps test ports, Cisco provided 40 and 100 Gbps switch and router ports, Mellanox provided 40 Gbps NICs, and development boards from Altera and Vitesse were used for transceiver testing.
Participating companies were Altera, Amphenol, CommScope, Cisco, FCI, Finisar, Ixia, Leviton, Mellanox Technologies, Opnext, Panduit, Siemon, Vitesse Semiconductor, and Volex Grouphttp://www.ethernetalliance.org
