Hardware Podcasts

The Return to the Chamber of Mysteries

Oxide and Friends · 25 Aug 2026 · 1h 16m · Episode 18

What this episode covers

Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal of Oxide Computer Company are joined by Robert "RFK" Keith, Dan Chirpich, and Stu Donnan to discuss the company's recent struggle with FCC EMC compliance for their next-generation rack. The team details how testing 32 AMD Turin-based Cosmo sleds in Rack Model 0.5 revealed unexpected radiated emissions at 26.562 GHz from QSFP transceiver cages. After days of failed debugging attempts involving paint masking and cable repacking, a breakthrough came from a conference talk by Dan Chirpich on finite difference time domain analysis, which suggested using absorbing materials. The team successfully mitigated the issue by die-cutting and applying these absorbers to the connectors, allowing them to pass compliance testing.

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Oxide Computer Company
Products
Cosmo
Chips
AMD Turin
Also
QSFP, FCC, IEEE EMC+SIPI

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