On the 16th of january 2025 I did my graduation session at Windesheim University of Applied Sciences, presenting and defending my research and finished project I did as my internship at Aimvalley in Hilversum.
I graduated with flying colours, receiving a 9 from the graduation committee. The committee consisted of the following people:
- Windesheim
- Anke Kuijk (main assessor)
- Martin Snijder (second assessor)
- Aimvalley
- Bastiaan van Weerd (first mentor)
- Niels Schipper (second mentor)
- External
- Richard Mijnheer (external assessor)
Many thanks to the committee for assessing my work, Aimvalley for allowing me to work on a amazing project and learning a lot and Windesheim for there support and help in the internship.
The project at Aimvalley consisted of creating a QSFP 100 Gbit/s breakout board for internal use at Aimvalley for testing and taking measurements of QSFP networking equipment.
At the start of the assignment there where was no proper way off connecting testing equipment like BER-testing or high bandwidth oscilloscopes to Aimvalley developed QSFP hardware. The objective of a breakout board is to “break out” all signals of a connector/connection for testing or wiring purposes. For QSFP it meant that the high speed data lines need to broken out to be able to attach testing equipment. Because of the intention to use the product to quantify performance of connected QSFP devices the product it self needed to be as less as a influence on the measurement as possible to be able to take qualitative measurements of the device under test. Besides the most important high speed signals QSFP has also status and programming signals which need to be broken out and which had a major influence on PCB-stackup because of the routing space needed.
The main goals where:
- Functional and tested product capable of 25 Gbit/s per QSFP channel for total throughput of 100 Gbit/s
- Control of the QSFP status lines
- EEPROM for QSFP identification
- Testing out Simbeor as a high speed simulation tool and comparing it with Keysight ADS
Extensive testing demonstrated that the product passed, even sometimes surpassed, all the goals, which resulted in a usable product which is being used at Aimvalley.
I learned a lot about high speed networking, high speed/low loss PCB design, simulation of PCB trace structures (with KeySight ADS and Simbeor), project management, and project communication.
References of my work at Aimvalley are available
See also the spring edition of the Aimvalley newsletter mentioning my graduation. And the celebratory post of external assessor Richard Mijnheer.