TPA - USB Transport

[drone]

Hi,

any info on progress?

thx

[dglow]

Originally Posted by LeonvB

It's a low cost solution, mainly developed because copper wiring for these speeds will either be extremely limited in length or very expensive.

Sounds like v 1.0 of LightPeak will be electrical, not optical.

[LeonvB]

Could be, but it's made to make the move to optical: 10G is still possible with copper but the lengths are reduced.

[regiregi22]

you already have an ready commercial interface for transmiting data at 17.3 Gb/s

DisplayPort - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edit: Forgot to say that it runs on copper.

[LeonvB]

Let's see: 10G over CAT6A is 55m max. That's a fairly delicate cable BTW, too much bending or hanging out of an outlet for too long (just it's own weight) will ruin performance. But it's less than 1$/m so that's fine for widespread usage in buildings.

Displayport indeed supports 17.3Gbps, but only for up to 3m. It's also fairly expensive, at around 10 times the price of CAT6A.

And there's infiniband, running up to 30 Gbps @ x12/SDR, and even higher in DDR or QDR configurations. But those cables are around 100 times the price of CAT6A, and again 3m max. in general.

It's a trend: as we raise the bandwidth, the maximum cable length goes down and the price goes up. We're not too far from the point where optical fibres are cheaper to use, even in everyday equipment. And that's where Lightpeak is for: a chip with 4 links is projected to cost around 10$, and if we look at the patching price: short OM3 cables are around the same price of displayport. But OM3 is capable of doing runs of 600m instead of just 3m.

Going back to the USB receiver: Russ, is it possible to design it with a standard IDC connection (AKA what's on most PC mainboards)? That way people could use the cheap USB brackets delivered with many mainboards to mount it in the chassis. They're cheap and very easy to mount.
I mean brackets like this one: http://www.createch.com.tw/images/us...1-x30-1-80.jpg

[Russ White]

Hey guys.

I am still working on this, but I need some clarification from XMOS and the driver developer about some licensing issues and driver issues before I can make much more headway.

[LeonvB]

Somehow that doesn't sound like good news to me...

[Russ White]

Well there are two main issues.

Windows driver not quite up to snuff (in initital testing).

We are also just sure yet on some legal questions.

On the plus side I am having great results on my mac.

[grubyhalo]

What about the Linux side of things?

[Sonority]

On the plus side I am having great results on my mac.

Well that's the news I wanted to hear!
(Mac convert)