It seems that Gallium Arsenide technology has earned a bad name – Vitesse Semiconductor Corp has come out with what it reckons is the first transceiver for Gigabit Ethernet, (although the IEEE has yet to adopt a standard for the technology), but neglects to mention that the VSC7135 is a GaAs implementation. The Camarillo, California company says the VSC7135 is a fully integrated 1.25Gbps transceiver with digital clock and data recovery, on-chip high-speed clock generation for transmission and 700mW power dissipation to provide the physical layer interface requirements of the Gigabit Ethernet market. It combines Ethernet with the off-the-shelf physical layer technology of Fiber Channel, for which the company offers the VSC7125 Fiber Channel transceiver on which the new part is based. The company says that injection locking, noise and crosstalk problems in systems using multiple phase-locked loops are eliminated by implementing both clock multiplication and clock recovery with a single fully integrated phase-locked loop. The VSC7135 runs off a single +3 .3V supply and is sampling now with volume in the first quarter 1997. Initial pricing is under $20 for 10,000-and-up unit volumes.
