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IBM Debuts Optical Transceiver Chipset
IBM debuted a new optical transceiver chipset today that researchers within the company promise will allow users to download data eight times faster than current technology. IBM cited the rising demand for digital media such as movies as the driving force behind the new technology. "IBM says it can meet that need, building its new chipset by making an optical transceiver with standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology, and combining that with optical components crafted from exotic materials such as indium phosphide and gallium arsenide. The resulting package is just 3.25mm by 5.25mm in size, small enough to be integrated onto a printed circuit board."
Five years ago, you were right. Not anymore.
SiGe is killing GaAs.
Many of the devices communicating in the higher frequences of the microwave range are based on Silicon Germanium. This includes cell phones.
Almost ALL WiFi radios are SiGe [PDF warning]. Some have even moved to RFCMOS.
Most GPS devices are SiGe.
Oh, and TV Tuners, too.
Gallium Arsenide *is* exotic, because it has to be done in specialized fabs, not those that run silicon wafers. That significantly drives up the cost vs. SiGe and RFCMOS.
So what? The disc can't physically read more than that data rate off the platters, so what's the point of having that much speed? Without some major advance, it's unlikely that hard drives will need anything faster than 3 Gb/s for a while. Maybe when we have some kind of super-fast holographic storage, this might be more important.
There's several good reasons we have SATA: it's fast enough (actually, much more than fast enough; do any drives read faster than 100 MB/s? 3 Gb/s = 375 MB/s), it's easy to use, has small cables which don't impede airflow, and best of all it's cheap. Do you really want to put an optical interface on your hard drive which costs more than the rest of the drive? I'd rather not return to the days of $1000-3000 hard drives.