Aquantia’s products pushing the boundaries
From its inception, Aquantia has strived to push the boundaries of the possible. Whereas its competitors have merely taken a brute force approach to solving the 10GBASE-T challenge, leading to high power and large die size, Aquantia’s team of leading experts has taken the high roads of innovation, creating the Mixed-Mode Signal Processing (MMSP) architecture.
This approach has led Aquantia to delivering the highest performance and lowest power 10GBASE-T solution to date. The MMSP’s leading building block is a unique Analog Front-End (AFE) that partially cancels impairments on the incoming signal (such as crosstalk, echo, etc.). As a result of this front-end signal processing, the ensuing Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) can be designed with lesser requirements, leading to a lower power and smaller size AFE. Post-ADC, the amount of signal processing needed to be performed on the signal is greatly reduced, which results in a less complex, lower power and smaller die size digital architecture. So differentiated and efficient is this MMSP architecture, that Aquantia’s 1st generation of 10GBASE-T PHYs, designed in 90nm, were already lower power than its competitors designed in the more complex 65nm process node. Leaning on its integration capabilities and its novel MMSP architecture, Aquantia was the 1st in the industry to sample a monolithic single-chip 10GBASE-T PHY, when the rest of the industry was still toying with multi-chip solutions. It was also the 1st in the industry to demonstrate the full performance of 10GBASE-T in the 40nm process node.
It has since then furthered its leadership by delivering the smallest footprint quad-port 10GBASE-T solution for high-density switches and the world’s only dual-port solution for 10GBASE-T LAN-on-Motherboard (LOM) servers. Both chips are now playing a critical role in enabling the fast transition from Gigabit to 10Gigabit Ethernet in the exploding market of Cloud computing and large-scale Data Centers.