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by phoenix3200
1467 days ago
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Photonics and copper both travel at about the speed of light. Photonics requires special circuitry to do the conversion to/from light. And don't get me started on how PCIe just isn't designed for optics, or really any kind of amplifier. Over a long distance, or due to signaling rate, it makes sense, but onboard it makes little sense unless we have optic switches which are faster than silicon. |
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Just going to put this out there since it's totally non-obvious to a lot of armchair engineers, but this is not at all true. Velocity factor in most transmission lines (optical or electrical) is typically about 0.66c but varies depending on the material and the physical dimensions of the medium.
In very highspeed circuit design, (10s of ghz) both path length and velocity factor matching are considered when evaluating timing constraints for chipscale features.