Varian Associates Inc, Palo Alto, California says it has developed a distributed amplifier and claims that it could greatly speed some types of networking operations: the new device, fabricated in Indium Gallium Arsenide on an Indium Phosphide substrate, uses high-electron mobility transistor technology and is aimed at applications like radar and communications systems that operate at frequencies in the 94GHz W-band, and it could also find application in vehicle collision avoidance systems and satellite communications; they can also be integrated with high-speed semiconductor optical devices to produce ultra-wideband fibre-optic systems to create circuitry that could run at 100Gbps, 50 times faster than currently-used fibre optic components.
