A GaAs transceiver chip for optical data transmission

The authors describe a transceiver VLSI chip for optical data transmission, at 1 Gb/s (1.4 Gb/s in selected production), made in GaAs technology. The transceiver performs parallel-to-serial and serial-to-parallel conversion as well as encoding and decoding of 32-b data words. The circuit operates in a completely asynchronous mode, allowing the possibility of switching on-off the transmission in a few ns and of using the transceiver not only in point-to-point topologies, but also in flooding topologies (i.e. star connections). The radiation hardness and the relatively low power consumption, with respect to TTL, of the GaAs, extend the use of the chip to a large number of applications in present and future high-energy physics experimental apparatus