Molex scales deployments of solutions to meet data centre demands

Author: Beatrice

Molex is scaling global deployments of its high-speed copper and optical interconnects and modules to help customers better address demands for higher bandwidth. Molex’s broad portfolio of next-generation connectivity solutions leverage the latest advancements in copper and optics to deliver high signal integrity, lower latency and reduced insertion loss for optimal efficiency, speed and density.

Gartner expects end-user spending on global data centre infrastructure to reach $200 billion this year, as large enterprise facilities resume expansion while hyperscalers continue to expand globally. Additionally, skyrocketing demand for bandwidth-intensive, data-driven services, which accelerated during COVID-19, is fuelling a rise in compute, data storage and networking capabilities. To keep pace, companies are moving from monolithic data centre designs to distributed and disaggregated architectures, which creates significant connectivity challenges.

“There is no such thing as ‘one size fits all’ interconnect technologies to support different applications across today’s enterprise and hyperscale data centres,” says Aldo Lopez, president, Datacom Solutions, Molex. “We offer our customers and ecosystem partners the broadest portfolio of future-proof interconnect solutions, which ease transitions to new architectures and simplify engineering development while reducing costs and time to market.”

Driving Copper Innovations with New 112G AEC Cables

Molex has added the new 112G Active Electrical Cables (AEC) to its line of copper interconnect solutions that extend link reach at higher data rates. AEC increases reach up to five meters without requiring optical cables while also supporting smaller conductors for improved cable management. AEC can also support gearbox capabilities as well as smart cable functionality for adding an extra measure of system-level redundancy.

This latest addition to the Molex copper interconnect family joins Active Copper Cable (ACC), which works just like passive cable to extend the reach of external cabling and supports low-power linear amplifier-based semiconductors for improved power management and thermal needs. Rounding out the copper lineup is Molex’s industry-leading BiPass technology, which delivers best-in-class signal integrity with multiple near-ASIC connector solutions, including TGA and the NearStack family of connectors.

Molex’s vertical BiPass implementation offers industry-leading thermal performance and low-power requirements, which let datacentres reduce their carbon footprints. BiPass also provides low latency for end-to-end channel performance while lowering TCO by reducing printed circuit board (PCB) costs.

Meeting Changing Data Center Landscape with 100G Optical Transceivers

Molex also is driving industry-wide efforts to increase adoption of 100G and 400G optical links and module technologies. The company is ramping deployment of a complete range of 100G per lambda transceivers for high-performance data centre, cloud and wireless connectivity.

As part of its customer-centric and partner-focused activities, Molex supports a full IEEE- and MSA-compliant portfolio and product roadmap to meet both intra-data centre interconnect, and data centre interconnect requirements. The expanding optical transceiver family includes 100G-DR, 100G-FR, 100G-LR, 400G-DR4 (500m and 2km), 400G-FR4, 400G-LR4, 400G-ZR and 400G-ZR+ as well as 800G roadmap products.

Molex’s pluggable optical transceiver models all benefit from the company’s vertical-integration expertise in silicon photonics, photonic integration, module assembly and packaging. Together, these integrated capabilities and experience enable Molex to deliver optimized data rates and low power consumption in a small form factor.