Wire speed refers to the rate of data transfer a given telecommunication technology provides at
the physical wire level. Wire-speed, an adjective, describes any hardware box or function
that tends to support this data transfer rate without slowing it down. It's common to refer to
functions embedded in microchips rather than in software programming as working at wire speed.
Switches,, routers, and other devices are sometimes described by their manufacturers as operating
at wire speed. Data encryption
and decryption and hardware emulation are software functions that might run at wire speed (or close
to it) when embedded in a microchip.
This was last updated in January 2000
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