HOW WILL EXPANDING DATACOM/NETWORKING technologies affect connector manufacturers? The vast majority of nonresidential computers are linked in a network and more and more home computers are networking as well, creating many connection opportunities. The modern local area network (LAN) industry dates from 1979--Ethernet, Token Ring, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), FDDI, Fiber Channel, residential access lines, digital subscriber lines (DSL), HFC, FTTC. The Internet started in 1969 and 30 years later has exploded. The big issue on the Internet is deploying bandwidth to keep up with demand.
Data transmission in premise networks, short-reach (less than 100m) telecom, and computer interconnects are dominated from copper interconnections up to1Gbit/sec. data rated. Further increase in the date rates demand the use of optical fibers.
Nineteen-ninety nine was billed as the year of the Home Network. The Home Phone Networking Alliance (HPNA), Home RF, Bluetooth, CEMA, and other groups that have standards in the works for home networking will evolve to make these available to vendors. One billion dollars will be spent on home networks during the next three years. There are 50 million U.S. households which already use the Internet, more than 18 million of these homes have two or more PCs, and 73 percent of new PCs are sold into homes of current PC owners so they might want to network.
Looking at connector and cable assembly trends, the emphasis is on networking for servers, especially the business scalable types driven by Internet connectivity, home networks, interconnectivity of handhelds, i.e., personal digital assistants, mobile telephony, global positioning systems, etc., and finally, connecting the ubiquitous desktop PC and its peripherals via faster and faster digital serial interfaces like USB, IEEE 1394 FireWire, FC-AL, ATA/66, and wider ultra-SCSI. Looking at connector and cable assembly trends, the emphasis is on networking for servers, especially the business scalable types driven by Internet connectivity, home networks, interconnectivity of handhelds, i.e., personal digital assistants, mobile telephony, global positioning systems, etc., and finally, connecting the ubiquitous desktop PC and its peripherals via faster and faster digital serial interfaces like USB, IEEE 1394 FireWire, FC-AL, ATA/66, and wider ultra-SCSI.
Per the PC board and packaging road maps of leading network systems OEMs like Cisco, Sun Microsystems, and Nortel/Bay Networks, there will be tremendous increases in ASIC devices I/O counts. This entails the use of Z-Axis packaging interconnect technologies such as BGA, FCBGA, and chip-scale packaging.
With circuit board component pad density essentially doubling from 90 pads per square inch in 1998 to 175 pads per square inch in 2001, new microvia PC board and packaging technologies will have to be explored and utilized. Network topologies from Cisco show speed/bandwidth scenarios moving from OC48 or 2.4Gbit/sec. line rate at 144 bit bus width and 100MHz in 1998 to OC192 or 10Gbit/sec. line rate at 256 bit bus width and 200MHz in 1999.
There is also a movement to "active" backplanes (BGAs and flip-chips mounted directly to the backplane) and a push from maximum 28 layers to 32 layers while undertaking advanced R&D work on optical backplanes and their applications.
Most common LAN cable upgrades in the next 18 months will be installations of CAT. 5/UTP with RJ-45 modular mag jacks at the desktops and wiring closets with multimode fiber cable in risers and backbones.
PC architecture for I/O will migrate from parallel to high-speed serial bus and the x86 legacy PCI and ISA buses will give way to USB, which supports 1.5Mbit/sec. and 12Mbit/sec., and IEEE 1394, mainly for digital imaging peripherals as its use in HDD interconnections will be forestalled by ATA/66, among other things.
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