Design considerations for 50G+ backplane links

The constantly increasing need for I/O bandwidth push electrical backplane links to data rates of 50Gb/s and above. Although board materials have improved significantly, backplane links are increasingly limited by signal attenuation while suffering from ISI, jitter, device noise and cross-talk. In this paper we summarize these limitations, and show possible directions to cope with them in order to further extend the achievable data rate.