MediaTek announces 800GbE MT3729 for Data Centers and 5G Infrastructures

MediaTek announced today the commercial availability of the MT3279 800GbE MACsec retimer PHYs designed for high-speed and ultra-low power data transmissions.

Mediatek MT3729 for high-speed data transmissions

New MT3729 product family from MediaTek

The MT3729 is designed to be used in data centers and 5G infrastructure applications. It uses MediaTek's industry-leading 56G PAM4 SerDes technology available as a standalone application-specific standard part (ASSP).

It will also equip Tier-1 network equipment and service providers to enable secure, reliable, and high-speed data transfer for modem networking infrastructure.

Expectations indicate that data center demand for 400GbE and above networking is set to see strong growth by the end of 2020. Projections also expect it to make up more than 25 percent of industry shipments by 2024.

The MT3729 is ideal for line cards or switch fabrics to build multi-terabit network servers, switches, and routers with secure high-speed data links and highly accurate Class-C PTP timestamping features.

Here are the MT3729 product family's four operation modes:

• Retimer Mode - Built-in signal enforcement technology extends the SerDes connection distance and transmission to the edge for more precise timestamping.
• Forward/Reverse Gearbox Mode - Support for bitrate translation between 56G and 28G links enables next-gen switches to seamlessly connect with existing infrastructure.
• MUX/DeMUX Mode - Hitless MUX and broadcast switching meets networking redundancy requirements.
• MACsec Mode - IEEE 802.1AE MACsec support enables secure communications with AES-128 and AES-256 encryption from 1GbE to 400GbE per port.

The MT3729 product family is also designed to support up to 16 bi-directional links at 56G PAM4, up to 28G NRZ SerDes, and 1G SGMII. For tighter timing sync for 5G networks, it also supports IEEE 1588v2 and SyncE up to Class-C.

The MT3729 product family is now available with the first batch of customer products already in development.

What do you guys think?