🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi:

Here's a futuristic question I'm puzzling over.

It has been asserted that there's an impending fiber/silicon bottleneck
in data communications.  The argument says, in short, that we can signal
far faster in a fiber than we can hope to get the electronics going in
silicon, and we have to study that problem.  So I'm polling this group
of silicon experts to see what you think.

At its very best (wind-aided, etc.) a fiber could conceivably achieve a
transmission 40 terabits/second (40 Thz).  My understanding is that the
key problem is figuring out how to clock bits that fast into silicon.

My immediate reaction is that I would expect there might be some way to
make this fly.  For example, 1 terabit per second, on an 128-bit wide
bit path is about a 0.1 ns clock cycle, which is only a modest improvement
over what DEC reputedly hopes to achieve for Alpha clock cycles in the
future.  Now going serial to parallel would presumably require some pico-second
logic somewhere, but maybe that's possible.

As you can tell, I'm not a hardware engineer -- I'm a software person, trying
to figure out where the technology boundaries really are.  Comments welcome.

Thanks!

Craig Partridge
craig@bbn.com