The XFI electrical interface specification

The XFI electrical interface specification was a 10 gigabit per second chip-to-chip electrical interface specification defined as part of the XFP multi-source agreement. It was also developed by the XFP MSA group. XFI provides a single lane running at 10.3125 Gbit/s when using a 64B/66B encoding scheme. A serializer/deserializer is often used to convert from a wider interface such as XAUI that has four lanes running at 3.125 Gbit/s using 8B/10B encoding. XFI is sometimes pronounced as "X" "F" "I" and other times as "ziffie".

Dimensions:The physical dimensions of the XFP transceiver are slightly larger than the original small form-factor pluggable transceiver (SFP). One of the reasons for the increase in size is to allow for on-board heat sinks for greater cooling.

XFP dimensions are:Height: 0.33 inches (8.5 mm) Width: 0.72 inches (18.3 mm) Depth: 3.1 inches (78 mm)

The XFP packaging was smaller than the XENPAK form-factor which had been published earlier (by almost a year). Some vendors supported both, or the XENPAK follow-ons called XPAK and X2.

July 18, 2011

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