Compaq Computer Corp, Western Digital Corp, AMP Inc and Sun Microsystems Inc have agreed to standardise on the Fibre Channel interconnect specification. The specification is intended to be used in a broad range of applications requiring hot-pluggability and hot-growth scalability at 1Gbps data rates. The companies intend to make the full specification immediately available for industry-wide use, including module, system, networking and connector manufacturers. Using the new interconnect specification, Western Digital is now sampling a Fibre Channel Optical-to-Electrical transceiver module, the OE1063SW. The new transceiver module is a highly integrated data communication subsystem which provides fibre optic serial links at a signalling rate of 1062.5Mbps transmission. The OE1063SW implements the Fibre Channel physical layer-2 ANSI standard specification which enables OEM customers to take advantage of the lower power, higher reliability features for clustered and switched applications over fibre cabling.
