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Building 800G Copper Cables Using the Right Retimers

Dec. 3, 2024

112G SerDes and retimers are needed for copper cabling to hit 800G speeds.

What you’ll learn:

How retimers make active electrical cables possible.
How e-Tube will help copper cables exceed 800G.

400G copper cables make up the bulk of connections in data centers these days, with 800G and 1.6T looming on the horizon. Active electrical cables (AECs) are a requirement for copper cabling.

In this episode of Inside Electronics, Senior Content Director and Editor of Electronic Design, Bill Wong, talks with David Kuo, AVP of Product Marketing and Business Development at Point2 Technology, about AECs. This includes the company’s new Point2 P1B121 integrated, eight-unidirectional SerDes with smart clock data recovery (CDR) and retimer functions that support 112G PAM4 needed for 800G copper cabling.

We also talk about Point2 Technology’s e-Tube RF-based cabling and how, when combined with retimers, it can be used to build 1.6-Tb AEC copper cables.

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.