IBM today announced it had developed a prototype chip that could transmit up to 8 terabit/sec of information -- equivalent to about 5,000 high-definition video streams -- using the power of a single 100-watt lightbulb.
The applications for the technology IBM is calling its “green optical link” range from cell phones to supercomputers. The optically-enabled circuit boards, or "Optocards," employ an array of low-loss polymer optical waveguides to conduct light between transmitters and receivers, IBM said.
The complete databus constructed with these Optocards incorporates a large number of high-speed channels and closely packs them to achieve huge densities: each waveguide channel is smaller in size than a human hair, IBM said. In addition to the optical data bus, IBM said it developed a parallel optical transceiver module with a higher number of channels and an increased speed of operation: 24 transmitters and 24 receivers that each operate at 12.5 Gb/s.
The resulting total bi-directional data transfer rate is 300 Gb/s, nearly doubling the performance of a version IBM introduced last year. Compared to current commercial optical modules the transceiver provides 10-fold greater bandwidth in 1/10 the volume while consuming comparable power, IBM said.
Big Blue said perhaps the new optical technology’s most important benefit will be saving massive amounts of power in supercomputers. For a typical 328ft long link, the power consumed by the optical technology is 100 times less than today's electrical interconnects, and offers a power savings of 10 times over current commercial optical modules, IBM claims.
Other applications include:
· Video: This technology will enable widespread high definition video sharing and video on-demand by increasing the bandwidth of video servers. Web-serving sites that host videos could use the technology to access libraries with millions of high-definition movies and video clips in seconds, speeding up access for users. By incorporating an optical data port in laptops, HD video recorders, personal mp3 and video players, cell phones, or PDAs, HD video content could be stored and displayed on high-resolution screens.· Healthcare: Physicians and researchers could send large files such as MRIs and heart scans for real-time analysis and 3-D visualization.
· Electronics: "Scaled-down" versions of the optical interconnect technology may find applications in cell phones, one chip could sit in the base of the phone and the other could sit in the display, letting large files, even high-definition content move from one to the other. The advantage is that optics eliminate wires.
This increased bandwidth is the result of two specific advances, Big Blue said. First, the new transceiver includes 24 channels for sending and receiving data compared to 16 such channels in the previous device. Second, the modulation rate of each of the transceiver's vertical cavity surface emitting lasers has been increased by 25% to 12.5 billion bits per second. In an effort to speed commercialization efforts, IBM has incorporated lasers and detectors that operate at the industry-standard wavelength of 850 nanometers (nm) instead of the proprietary 985-nn technology used in IBM’s earlier transceiver.
The device was produced as part of an ongoing Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program to speed up chip-to-chip communications for supercomputers.
Layer 8 in a box
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No, zipping files is when
No, zipping files is when you compress them. Quit trying to confuse me!
Optical Detectors
Dr. John L. Hall won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the optical comb and attained the femto level detectors that enable these abilities. I was wondering why an article about his collaborations with Austrailian scientists that described their abilities led to an article about IBM instead? These technologies did not come out of DARPA. They were developed in the University Laboratories and as far as I know, Dr. Hall has not yet licenced HIS technology to IBM.