100GB Ethernet Coming to Your Core?

I love Germany. How can you not like a country that has no speed limit and awesome beer. I could move there and not miss a step. Of course the food sucks, so I reckon that is the trade off. I love speed and performance. A couple years back I purchased a couple of Go-Peds for my kids but that was not enough...I had to soup those little dudes up squeeze a another ounce of horsepower out of them. I put on a header, bigger carb, manufactured an intake and advanced the timing as well as changed the splines, man those dudes could really fly!!

Now the IEEE has moved 100GB closer to reality with the 802.3ba task force. The High Speed Study Group has included physical layer two data rates; 40GB @ 100m for servers and storage and 100GB @ 40Km for aggregation and networking gear. It is planned to be ready by 2010. Hey that was a cool flick wasn't it? I didn't think 2001 was all that, truthfully, I think Stanley Kubrick sucks, but I did like 2010 and Full Metal Jacket...

Anyway...

One of the great ideas that is surfacing in that working group for physical coding sublayer interfaces is called inverse multiplexing. I think inverse anything is cool. Inverse SYN cookies, Inverse Multiplexing and Singin Inverse. Anyway, It is based upon this way cool concept of virtual lanes. By using 64B/66B framing and scrambling (compared to 8b/10b) that we use in 10Gb currently we now have a very low overhead (approx 3%) for up to 100Gb speeds. Dig that! x10 the speed with an increase of ONLY 3%. Now we inverse multiplex that signal for transmission and that means we can use some very basic optics to send these higher data rates. I must admit I am a little confused on how a 10:4 SerDes gearbox is going to map out 20 lanes of traffic with demux-mux coding, but I know that is my own goober-ness and I just need to work with it a bit.

I love this idea because it keeps manufacturing cost low and it reuses an already proven technology to run higher data rates. This means for all us speed lovers it is time to put 10GB in the far right lane....

Jimmy Ray