A3CUBE partners with FCI to provide a commercial solution for PCIe over standard optical cable

In response to increasing demand for high bandwidth and on-demand applications within PCIe based networks, A3CUBE Inc. has announced a partnership with FCI that introduces a remarkable improvement in standard PCIe based communication.

A3CUBE’s RONNIEE 2S, is a PCIe Network Interface Card with 80 Gb/s of aggregated bandwidth and four external Mini-SAS HD ports capable of running four PCIe x4 Gen 2 links (4 links x 20 Gb/s) over Mini-SAS HD cables. Connectivity options for the RONNIEE 2S include both copper and optical versions of the Mini-SAS HD cable. Connections up to 9m can be established over a standard AWG24 Mini-SAS HD copper cable. For longer lengths or for easier cable management, the RONNIEE 2S supports Mini-SAS HD Active Optical Cables. With the support of FCI, A3CUBE procured state of the art optical cables of varying lengths that were necessary for successful field tests.

A3CUBE’s innovative RONNIEE 2S card successfully overcomes all the current constraints that affect the development of working solutions for optics including, but not limited to, connector related constraints, PCIe related constraints and the communication constraints that are related to traditional optical receivers.

“Historically, high speed data transfer over cable had too many physical limitations,” remarked Emilio Billi, CTO of A3CUBE. “With RONNIEE 2S, you can extend the real time connectivity between computation and I/O using only native PCIe protocol over standard optical cables.”

The realization of using active optical cables in a board that is usually equipped with passive copper cables presents a remarkable improvement for the PCIe Standard and enables the development of new and more powerful applications. A3CUBE’s RONNIEE Express is an innovative solution in this regard, due to the remarkable scalability in performance and number of nodes permitted by the technology.