Analysis and Application Prospects of Active Copper Cable (ACC) Technology

Foreword

In an era of exponential data growth, data centers and various digital communication scenarios face increasingly urgent demands for high-speed, stable data transmission. As a crucial member of the high-speed copper cable family, Active Copper Cable (ACC) is emerging with its unique advantages. Active ACC significantly enhances transmission capabilities by incorporating signal amplification and equalization technologies at the receiver end, offering an effective solution to the limitations of traditional passive DACs. As data rates continue to climb and the need for longer transmission distances grows, Active ACC plays an increasingly critical role in medium-to-short distance transmission scenarios, meeting market demands for cost, power consumption, and performance.

Active ACC Technology: Characteristics, Advantages, and Limitations

• Basic Attributes

The core of Active ACC lies in the linear Redriver equipped at the copper cable's receiving end, which undertakes the critical task of signal equalization and reshaping. This component effectively mitigates distortion and attenuation issues that occur during signal transmission. Concurrently, Active ACC utilizes **CTLE (Continuous Time Linear Equalization) technology** to precisely compensate for signal losses that typically occur in high-frequency bands, ensuring signal integrity throughout the transmission process and greatly enhancing data transmission quality and stability.

• Advantages

Active ACC boasts a significant low-cost advantage. Compared to active AEC and AOC, its manufacturing process is relatively simpler and material costs are lower, enabling substantial cost savings for enterprises during large-scale deployment. In terms of power consumption, Active ACC performs exceptionally well, consuming significantly less power than optical solutions, aligning with current trends towards energy saving and consumption reduction. This makes it highly attractive for data centers sensitive to electricity costs. It also features protocol transparency, requiring no additional protocol adaptation or complex processing, allowing direct application in existing communication systems and reducing the difficulty and complexity of system integration. Furthermore, Active ACC demonstrates excellent stability in varying temperature environments, maintaining consistent transmission performance under different temperature conditions, making its application scope wide.

• Disadvantages

Despite its numerous advantages, Active ACC also has certain limitations. In terms of transmission distance, Active ACC supports shorter distances compared to AEC, unable to meet long-distance transmission requirements. In high electromagnetic interference environments, its anti-interference capability is slightly weaker, often requiring additional shielding designs to ensure signal transmission remains undisturbed, which to some extent increases deployment costs and complexity.

Active ACC: A Key Player in Critical Interconnection Scenarios

• Medium-to-Short Distance Interconnection in Data Centers

Within data centers, Active ACC excels in intra-rack interconnection scenarios, commonly used for server-to-switch connections, reliably supporting medium-to-short distance transmission. In terms of inter-board interconnection, especially in NVLink architectures, Active ACC provides high-speed, low-latency connections for data communication between GPUs, contributing to efficient data center operations.

• AI Compute Clusters

AI training clusters demand extremely high data transmission bandwidth and low latency. With its high bandwidth and low-latency characteristics, Active ACC plays a crucial role in large-scale, short-distance interconnection scenarios within AI training clusters, providing strong support for rapid processing of massive data and accelerating the AI model training process.

• Distributed Chassis

In distributed chassis scenarios, the connection between ToR (Top of Rack) switches and servers is vital. Active ACC, with its robust performance, plays an important role in this connection, ensuring efficient data transmission within distributed chassis systems.

Comparison of Advantages and Disadvantages: Active ACC vs. Other Technologies

• Compared to Passive DAC

Compared to passive DACs, Active ACC offers significant performance improvements, supporting higher transmission rates and slightly longer transmission distances. However, due to the addition of signal processing components, its cost and power consumption are marginally higher than passive DACs.

• Compared to AEC

Active ACC has lower costs and lower power consumption, which are its prominent advantages in market competition. However, there is a certain gap in transmission distance and anti-interference performance compared to AEC.

• Compared to AOC

Active ACC's cost is significantly lower than AOCs, offering higher cost-effectiveness in medium-to-short distance transmission scenarios. Nevertheless, for long-distance and high-bandwidth demanding scenarios, AOCs hold a greater advantage due to their superior performance.

Active ACC: Current Market Landscape and Future Outlook

• Market Demand

With the continuous expansion of data center scale and the rapid development of AI clusters, the demand for high-performance interconnection over medium-to-short distances shows a sustained growth trend, providing broad market space for Active ACC.

• Development Trends

In terms of technical optimization, researchers are dedicated to enhancing Active ACC's signal equalization capabilities to achieve stable transmission over longer distances. Through mass production and design optimization, the goal is to reduce the cost per cable and improve the product's market competitiveness.

• Competitive Landscape

Currently, Active ACC's market share in the high-speed copper cable market is gradually increasing, with widespread application in emerging data centers and AI clusters. It is expected that in the future, Active ACC will form a complementary relationship with AEC and passive DACs, jointly meeting data transmission needs across various scenarios.

Active ACC: Filling the Gap in Medium-to-Short Distance High-Speed Interconnection, Leading a New Journey in Digital Communication

Active ACC, as a performance-upgraded version of DAC, successfully fills the demand gap for short- and medium-distance high-speed interconnection due to its low cost and low power consumption characteristics. As the demand for high-speed data transmission continues to grow, Active ACC will continuously optimize performance and reduce costs, maintaining its important position in data centers and AI fields, contributing crucial power to the development of digital communication and propelling the industry to a higher stage of development.