Fiber Optic Data Communication

Chapter 9

InfiniBand—The Interconnect from Backplane to Fiber

Ali Ghiasi,     Broadcom Corporation, Cupertino, California 95014

This chapter describes InfiniBand™ (IB) optical link interface. InfiniBand group was formed to facilitate development of a uniform interconnect from backplane to fiber. Prior to the development of IB nearly every computer manufacture developed a proprietary interconnect. Two earlier standardization efforts in this area were SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface) [1] and HiPPi6400 [2]; each attempted to develop an open high-performance interconnect. IB takes a further step in defining the high-performance System Area Interconnect, by eliminating the bottleneck inside the box. IB links scale from chip, backplane, IO Card, ...