High-speed line cards reemerge
When the telecommunications sector crashed more than three years ago, development of 10- and 40-Gbit/second line cards was dropped in favor of slower designs that provided a migration path from existing OC-3 and OC-12 equipment to OC-48-class speeds. But with OC-48 now proliferating and Gigabit Ethernet and 10-Gbit Ethernet starting to gain hold in metro markets, designers are once again building high-speed line cards that deliver 10 Gbits and beyond.