InfiniBand Network Architecture

Repeaters

Repeater's Purpose

Repeaters (also referred to as retiming repeaters) exists for two reasons:

• A long link between ports may experience weakened signal strength and built-up jitter. The repeater compensates for these conditions by reducing the amount of jitter and amplifying and retransmitting the data.

• A repeater can also be used to interface a copper cable and a fibre optic cable.

Repeater's Basic Operation

Refer to Figure 26-36 on page 757. A repeater deserializes the received bit stream into 10-bit symbols and recovers the clock that was used to transmit the data from the bit stream. This clock is the receive clock and is used to clock the 10-bit symbols into the elastic buffer. The symbols are clocked out of the elastic buffer using ...