Why E-Tube Cables Offer a Promising Alternative to Copper and Optical Interconnects

E-Tube cables offer a promising alternative to traditional copper and optical interconnects in meeting the next-gen demands of AI and ML data centers. In an industry facing relentless performance demands, E-Tube Technology could provide a powerful solution with advantages in energy efficiency, latency, scalability, and cost.

Data center operators are facing a Goldilocks-like dilemma, as they attempt to find the right interconnect solution to meet the escalating demands of AI data centers – one that is energy efficient, low latency, cost effective and scales to multi-terabit speeds to meet the next-gen compute requirements.

Enter E-Tube cables, which use radio wave transmission over durable, lightweight plastic materials. Unlike copper or optical cables, E-Tube interconnects scale seamlessly to the multi-terabit speeds needed in AI data centers, overcoming signal loss, high costs, and power inefficiencies associated with older technologies.

Traditional Interconnect Options

One cabling solution is the inexpensive old standby: copper. Copper-based interconnects have long been a reliable choice for short-reach applications, like top-of-rack switch connections, but they have a physical constraint that substantially limits their potential usage in AI/ML data centers.

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A physical phenomenon called the “skin effect” causes copper interconnects to suffer more and more signal loss as network data rate increase – and we know that data rates are increasing to 1600G and beyond to support next-gen workloads. To extend the length of copper wires, you can try using thicker copper wires, or AWG, but then you end up with cable bundles that are too thick, heavy, and rigid to deploy and can’t be serviced in high-density data center rack designs.

The other common alternative – one that can support multi-terabit network speeds – is fiber-optics. Optical interconnects can deliver data at high speeds and over much longer distances than copper, but they too come with drawbacks, specifically in power-efficiency, heat, reliability, and cost.

The key challenge is that optical cables require costly electrical and optical assembly components to make the conversion between the electrical and optical domains. Manufacturing remains a significant (and costly) challenge, requiring high-precision alignment and production processes to construct optical cables and modules with nanometer wavelengths.

To overcome some of the challenges of traditional optical interconnects, newer products have come along, such as co-packaged optics (CPO), which offers greater energy efficiency and higher density. However, optical technologies remain cost- and power-prohibitive for many data center use cases, including high-volume in-rack and adjacent rack applications.

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E-Tube Cables: A New Interconnect Alternative

An innovative alternative to conventional interconnect solutions has emerged that may offer the “just right” solution hyperscalers and enterprises have been looking for. Instead of relying on copper or fiber-optics, E-Tube technology uses radio wave transmission over a dielectric waveguide made of common plastic material, such as low-density polyethylene (LDPE).

Metrics shows that E-Tube’s plastic material offers a unique combination of benefits, including energy efficiency to reduce power and thermal issues, low latency, long cable reach, cost-efficiency and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to scale to the multi-terabit network speeds required in AI data centers.

E-Tube cables can be produced at similarly low prices, but where copper cables suffer from skin effect, E-Tube interconnects experience no change in channel loss as data rates increase, so the same cores can support 1600G, 3200G and beyond. Along with scaling more easily, E-Tube cables are also much lighter in weight and less bulky than copper, with a greater bend radius that improves routeability, reduces rack congestion, and simplifies field servicing.

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E-Tube offers similar fundamental advantages over optical interconnects. The key is that E-Tube is an all-electrical technology, so it does not require costly, power-hungry optical assemblies and complicated digital signal processors (DSPs).

With only an RF transmitter and receiver IC pair, E-Tube’s simple architecture delivers greater energy-efficiency and scalability than common optical alternatives. Power saved per cable translates to lower operating costs and, with less heat to dissipate, significant energy savings from the cooling system can be achieved.

One further advantage of E-Tube that’s worth pointing out, given its importance in AI/ML servers, is latency. At approximately 80 picoseconds, E-Tube latency is a full three orders of magnitude better than that of traditional optical cables. In addition to transferring data at multi-terabit speeds, E-Tube’s low latency enables fast synchronization of accelerator servers for parallel processing.

Again, the latency advantage is due to E-Tube’s streamlined architecture, as compared to that of optical cables, which rely on a DSP with multiple complex processing blocks.

Innovation to Support AI Data Centers

As AI drives the rapid transformation of today’s data centers, we need innovative infrastructure solutions that break the binary narrative of copper or optical for cable interconnect. E-Tube technology may be “just right” for in-rack and adjacent rack use cases in data centers.

Scalable to multi-terabits with cable reach of 7 meters, E-Tube provides the low latency and cost-efficiency needed to replace copper in high-density rack architectures. And it overcomes the fundamental power and cost challenges of optical interconnects for many hyperscale AI/ML data center applications and high-performance computing clusters.