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Interop lab cranks up speed for a 100 G Ethernet world

Uni New Hampshire also preps for PoE and auto standards

As standards bodies and vendors gear up for Ethernet to speed up all the way to all the way out to 100 Gbps, end users are also going to need confidence that their kit will do what it says on the box – and that it'll be interoperable.

To that end, the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Laboratory (IOL) has announced a bunch of new testing capabilities covering support for 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps Ethernet, 25 Gbps serial lanes, and emerging power-over-Ethernet, backplane Ethernet, and automotive Ethernet environments.

The IOL outlines the full detail of the standards it's now supporting in eye-watering detail here.

Speaking to The Register, the IOL's Jeff Lapak said there's lots of room in the higher-speed Ethernet standards for small differences between vendors. At 100 Gbps, he said, “there's lots of port types, media, modules and form factors, and it takes a while to shake out the winners from the losers.”

For example, much of the installed base of 100 Gbps Ethernet in the data centre uses 10 lanes of 10 Gbps, but products using the emerging standard of four 25 Gbps lanes are also pitched as hundred-gig products, and end users don't want to be burned by that. So, he said, the IOL is putting a strong focus on testing for the PHY layer.

“Even in the 25 Gbps serial kit there's a handful of different connectors,” he said. “In order to provide a detailed electrical analysis you need to do some adaptation – characterising the connectors and developing a methodology to make the tests repeatable is a challenge.

“We also do a lot of our own tool development,” Lapak continued. “At the Ethernet layer, the state machines in the specification, there aren't a lot of standard test harnesses to dive down to the single bit level.”

Lapak expects a 40/100 Gbps plugfest to take part in the first half of 2015 to show off the interoperability of the emerging standards.

Over in the automotive space, the IOL will be testing kit operating to the single pair, 100 Mbps Ethernet standard under a partnership with the OPEN Alliance. Other activities for the lab in 2015 will include a PoE plugfest for the 802.3af and 802.3at standards. ®

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