John D'Ambrosia, Manager, Semiconductor Relations, Tyco Electronics
Adam Healey, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Agere Systems

Ethernet has become widely deployed as a backplane fabric in a variety of applications, including wireless and wireline access equipment, blade servers, and high-capacity switches. To date, this practice has not been addressed by any formal standard. The IEEE P802.3ap (backplane Ethernet) Task Force, formed in May 2004, has been working to define Ethernet operation over electrical backplanes covering distances up to 1 m. This effort will combine the IEEE 802.3 media access controller (MAC) operating at 1 and 10 Gbps with three new physical-layer signaling systems: 1000BASE-KX, 10GBASE-KX4, and 10GBASE-KR.

This forum will review the current state of the specification and the underlying architecture of backplane Ethernet. Also, a detailed review of the analysis leading the selection of the 10GBASE-KR signaling scheme and backplane channel model will be provided.