When the designers decided to move to optical interconnect, they would feed the electrical signal from the ASIC into an optical module. This quantization noise can result in higher bit error rates in DSP-based re-timers compared to TSLink re-drivers. The latencies introduced by the DSP-based re-timers are in tens of nanoseconds—three orders of magnitude higher than that of TSLink re-drivers. Cost: TSLink re-drivers are small CMOS devices that are designed in planar (non-FinFet) 12-inch (300 mm) wafers. This results in TSLink re-drivers being more than 50% lower cost than DSP-based re-timers that need to be implemented in advanced FinFet nodes.