Hewlett-Packard Co says that its new HOLC-0266 Fibre Channel board (CI No 1,978) is to be used in a system that will eventually link 25 Cray-1-class minisupercomputers, more than 500 minicomputers and thousands of workstations over a one-square-mile campus for sharing of complex visualisation images and other data, and a medical-electronics manufacturer is designing products that will enable hospitals to transmit images from magnetic-resonance scans to hundreds of workstations throughout a medical complex, giving the medical staff simultaneous access to the information; the HOLC-0266 optical-link board connects the motherboard or input-output channel board of a desktop workstation or personal computer to a fibre-optic cable for serial, point-to-point links of up to two 6,000 feet at a signalling rate of 265.625Mbps; the board fully implements the FC-0 physical layer of the ANSI X3T9.3 Fibre Channel standard, incorporating the transmit-and-receive functions for both the electrical and optical interface, and has transmit circuits on one side and receive circuits on the other; transmitter functions are handled by a bipolar integrated circuit that takes in 10-bit-wide parallel data, serialises it, sets the high-speed timing and drives the laser; a bipolar receiver chip serves the complementary functions of deserialising the output of the transimpedance circuit, retiming the output and restoring it to 10-bit-wide parallel format; HOLC-K266 designer kits are also now available and cost $975.
