Since I brought up the subject on backplanes including optical backplane let me add the following. When PCs started to replace other computer architectures it became obvious that PC bus speed was an issue. Intel and others continued to improve it with faster and faster interfaces. Since nothing beats the speed of light I thought it would be better to just build an optical version of PCI bus. I never got beyond the concept in my head. Trouble is that it would be very costly to build such a backplane with tiny lasers for each line in PCI bus especially when you need to account for physical tolerances and protection from the dust.
While searching for additional information related to interesting discussion, opened by Philipp Burch in another thread, I came across HP optical backplane: http://www.hpl.hp.com/discover2012/pdf/OFC2011_Injection_Molded_Optical_Backplane.pdf I'm not sure if they explored the possibility to run more than one data line in each fiber. Different data transmission speeds could be mixed on the same physical fiber using different light colors and filters. Contrary to what some have suggested elsewhere, backplanes are not dead, they just keep evolving. -- Rafael ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
