A GaAs transceiver chip for optical data transmission

A transceiver VLSI chip is described for optical data transmission at 1 Gb/s (1.4 Gb/s in selected production). It is fabricated in GaAs technology. The transceiver makes parallel-to-serial and serial-to-parallel conversion, and encodes and decodes 32-b data words. The circuit operates in a completely asynchronous mode, allowing the possibility of switching on-off the transmission in a few nanoseconds, 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 transistor-transistor logic (TTL) of the GaAs extend the use of the chip to a large number of applications in high-energy physics experimental apparatus