Fibre Channel electrical interface

This is a genuine differential signalling system so no ground reference is carried through the cable, except for the shield.

A good signal looks rather like a sine-wave with a fundamental frequency of half the data rate, so 1 GHz for a typical system running at 2 gigabits per second.

In order to achieve such a low error-rate, jitter "budgets" are defined for the transmitter and cables.

The following sections describe the most common Fibre Channel pinouts with some comments about the purpose of their electrical signals.

There are also "device connectors" that can be found on Fibre Channel disk-drives and backplanes of enclosures.

That problem is avoided by providing three input pins to the disk that define the interface speed at which it will operate: