Molex, a company known for making various electronics and connectors, has today announced that the company has developed a first-of-its-kind chip-to-chip connector. Designed mainly for the data center, the Molex 224G product portfolio includes next-generation cables, backplanes, board-to-board connectors, and near-ASIC connector-to-cable solutions. Running at 224 Gbps speeds, these products use PAM4 signaling and boast with " highest levels of electrical, mechanical, physical and signal integrity." As the company states, future high-performance computing (HPC) data centers require a lot of board-to-board, chip-to-chip, and other types of communication to improve overall efficiency and remove bottlenecks in data transfer. To tackle this problem, Molex has a range of products, including Mirror Mezz Enhanced, Inception, and CX2 Dual Speed products.

Future generative AI, 1.6T (1.6 Tb/s) Ethernet, and other data center challenges need a dedicated communication standard, which Molex is aiming to provide. Working with various data center and enterprise customers, the company claims to have set the pace for products based on this 224G PAM4 chip-to-chip technology. We suspect that Open Compute Project (OCP) will be first in the line of adoption, ad Molex has historically worked with them as they adopted Mirror Mezz and Mirror Mezz Pro board-to-board connectors. The new products can be seen below, and we expect to hear more announcements from Molex's partners. Solutions like OSFP 1600, QSFP 800, and QSFP-DD 1600 already use 224G products.