Cable Cartridge

Overview

A cable cartridge is a structured assembly of high-speed cables pre-terminated into a connector housing that slots into the vertical spine of an AI rack, carrying signals between line cards, switch modules, and compute nodes from top to bottom of the rack. Unlike a traditional midplane or backplane PCB — which routes signals through copper traces on a rigid board — a cable cartridge uses discrete copper cables (e.g., twinax or quad-pair) that maintain better signal integrity at high lane speeds (224G, 448G) and can be independently replaced without removing the entire backplane.

The cable cartridge architecture is particularly well-suited to AI racks with high GPU density, where backplane trace signal loss at 224G+ becomes problematic and where the ability to upgrade signal capacity independently of the rack chassis is operationally valuable. TE Connectivity's Slingshot cable cartridge is designed for OCP-compliant AI racks and demonstrated a co-development integration with Astera Labs' active backplane chips.