As a hardware designer I'm worried about this more and more. PCB technology hasn't really advanced all that much in the past ~10 years, although the line rates

As a hardware designer I'm worried about this more and more. PCB technology hasn't really advanced all that much in the past ~10 years, although the line rates are going higher and higher. Back in the ~100Mhz days a 1ns edge was about 6 inches long in HR370-based circuit boards, which was long enough to barely matter. Now, at 10Gbps, your bits are half an inch long, and your high-end harmonics are on the scale of your via lengths. PCB design has gotten appreciably harder in the past few years as a result - maybe three years ago, when I laid my first 10Gbps traces, I remember thinking that this was bleeding edge stuff, and some of the techniques we used were pretty exotic for the time. Now, 10Gbps is run-of-the-mill and 28.05 is on the horizon (maybe even coming into town!). It seems like we've really taken up all of the slack in PCB tech and I wonder what will happen next. Maybe academia's optical dreams from the last millennium (silicon ICs with on-die/co-die optical xcvrs) will finally be realized. Without a revolution in the way PCBs are processed and designed I doubt we'll be able to push much past 28.05Gbps in copper.