Hewlett-Packard Co is claiming the first chip set designed for high-speed point-to-point communications at up to 1.5Gbps: the HDMP-1000 Gigabit-link chip set is designed to give workstations direct access to masses of data on mainframes, supercomputers, other workstations and disks at 20% of the cost of current high-speed links. Use in multimedia applications and telecommunications kit such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode switches is seen. The HDMP-1000 is claimed to be the first bipolar transmitter-receiver pair in silicon to exceed 1Gbps, operating as a virtual ribbon cable carrying parallel data over a single fibre cable up to six miles long. It includes all circuitry for encoding and decoding, multiplexing and demultiplexing, clock generation and tapping and all link start-up and maintenance,and costs $710 for one to nine sets, now.
