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Comment on TSMC bets on unorthodox optical techparent

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timing skew between lanes

That's a big part of it. I remember in the Early Pentium 4 days, starting to see a lot more visible 'squiggles' on PCB traces on motherboards; the squiggles essentially being a case of 'these lines need more length to be about as long as the other lines and not skew timing'

In the case of what the article is describing, I'm imagining a sort of 'harness cable' that has a connector on each end for all the fibers, and the fibers in the cable itself are all the same length, there wouldn't be a skew timing issue. (Instead, you worry about bend radius limitations.)

Would the SerDes be the new bottleneck in the approach

I'd think yes, but at the same time in my head I can't really decide whether it's a harder problem than normal mux/demux.

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