Samtec Announces New VITA 57.4 FMC+ Development Kits with FireFly™ Optical Engines

New Albany, IN: Samtec, a privately held $713MM global manufacturer of a broad line of electronic interconnect solutions, proudly announces the release of the two new FireFly™ FMC+ Development Kits. The first supports data rates of 25 Gbps per channel while the second runs at 28 Gbps per channel. These new solutions offer easy-to-use evaluation and development platforms for Samtec’s FireFly™ optical engines.

FireFly™ optical engines make the electrical to optical conversion in the transmit path and the optical to electrical conversion in the receive path. They are based on proven MultiMode optics and support cable lengths up to 100 m.

As a VITA 57.4-compliant FMC+ Module, Samtec’s new solutions can be used for optical data communication on any FPGA/SoC development platform that supports the VITA 57.4 interface. Both kits can run system data or BERT testing from a single channel to all sixteen channels in parallel. Technical documentation and FPGA reference designs are available for quick start-up.

“Evaluating 100 Gbps/112 Gbps optical engine technology has high barriers of entry,” said Matt Burns, Product Marketing Manager at Samtec, Inc. “Samtec’s new FireFly™ FMC+ Development Kits simplify the evaluation and development of FireFly™ technology by using the emerging FMC+ interface typcal of high-performance FPGA/SoC development tools.”