Ixia, a Keysight Business, Delivers First 200/100/50GE Speed Test Capability for the K400 400GE QSFP-DD Test System

06/08/2018

Keysight Technologies, Inc., a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers, and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, announced that Ixia, a Keysight Business, is first to ship a 400GE test system with multi-rate 200/100/50GE speed options for the K400 400GE QSFP-DD load module family. These multi-rate speed options allow network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) to test products at speeds based on the new IEEE 802.3cd draft standard and IEEE 802.3bs standard using the 400GE QSFP-DD module at 200GE, 100GE, and 50GE speeds, from a single port.

The demand for bandwidth intensive data center services such as 4K video and 5G mobile network services is pushing data center and network operators to equipment with the smallest footprint, lowest power consumption, and fastest electrical interfaces. As a result, network equipment manufacturers are moving from technology based on 28Gb/s electrical lanes with non-return-to-zero (NRZ) encoding to faster 56Gb/s electrical lanes with PAM4 encoding.

“Flexible test solutions are necessary to develop higher speed, multi-rate, high density Ethernet products for the leaders in the data center space,” said Sunil Kalidindi, vice president product management, at Keysight’s Ixia Solutions Group. “Network devices such as routers, switches and servers must be able to operate at all new speeds in the IEEE 802.3cd draft specification and IEEE 802.3bs on most, or all, ports on their devices.”

56Gb/s technology is at the forefront of Ethernet speed evolution—moving from legacy 25GE, 50GE, and 100GE (based on 28Gbs technology) to the new 200GE, 100GE, and 50GE interfaces expected to come to market this year. The Ixia K400 QSFP-DD load module is the only shipping test solution that can validate these technologies using 400GE-port fan-out media to deliver a future-proof platform for testing 400GE, 200GE, 100GE, or 50GE multi-speed or single-speed network devices.

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