Texas Instruments' interface chip to speed data transfer rates
By Andy Santoni InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 5:30 PM PT, May 31, 1998
Texas Instruments this week plans to unveil a technology designed to let the company produce chips that run at speeds as fast as 2.5Gbps without using esoteric and expensive manufacturing materials and circuit designs.
Later this year, TI intends to use the technology in an IEEE 1394 FireWire interface chip that will offer data transfer rates as fast as 800Mbps, according to Larry Blackledge, TI's worldwide business manager for bus solutions.
Double-speed Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel interfaces are "a little further off," Blackledge said.
The FireWire chip can be bumped to speeds of 1.6Gbps, then 2.5Gbps, Blackledge said. In a hard drive interface application, this would allow backing up a 1GB drive in about 4 seconds, he noted. Eventually, it could reach 3.2Gbps speeds, Blackledge said.
These speeds have been the province of chips built on gallium arsenide instead of silicon, or using bipolar instead of CMOS circuitry, said Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, a consultancy in Tempe, Ariz. Such devices are difficult to manufacture and difficult to incorporate into systems.
In contrast, the TI technology makes use of relatively standard CMOS design and manufacturing processes, which should make the chips less expensive, Strauss said.
TI will use the 0.25-micron process it already has up and running, and "0.18 is coming next year," Strauss said. That will make the chips even faster and less expensive, he said.
TI has already built prototype transceivers using the technology, said TI's Blackledge. An 800Mbps FireWire physical layer, or PHY, device should be in production by the end of the year, he added.
"In the future, we will see this technology doubling the speeds of serial data transmission," said Ed Suder, TI's design manager for physical interface products. Building 2Gbps Ethernet and Fibre Channel interfaces will require changes to these standards, he noted.
Texas Instruments Inc., in Dallas, is at ti.com.
Andy Santoni is a senior writer for InfoWorld.
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