Repeater/Timer & Serial Link Replicator Rev Up High-Speed Nets

A pair of industry firsts is said to be offered by the VSC7130 Dual Repeater/Timer and VSC7132 Serial Link Replicator, with the former designed to improve signal quality and eliminate jitter transfer in duplex serial links and the latter used for routing serial signals in Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet, ATM, SONET and HDTV applications running at speeds up to 1.5 Gb/s. Both chips are compliant with Gigabit Ethernet IEEE 802.3z and Fibre Channel NCITS T11 specs.
The VSC7130 packs a pair of bidirectional clock and data recovery (CDR) circuits configurable as repeaters or retimers or bypassed altogether. As a repeater, the IC recovers and retransmits incoming signals synchronously with the recovered clock to improve signal integrity and attenuate jitter with low latency. As a retimer, the retransmission occurs with a local clock to eliminate jitter transfer at the expense of longer latency. The VSC7132 Link Replicator is used to provide a duplicate of a serial link for connectivity or redundancy reasons. VSC7130 comes in 64-pin TQFPs costing