World's Fastest Optical Chipset from IBM

Today IBM scientists announced that they would demonstrate this week at the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference a prototype optical transceiver chipset capable of reaching speeds at least eight times faster than optical components available now. The chipset is able to move information at blazing speeds of 160 Gigabits per second by speeding the flow of data using light pulses, instead of sending electrons over wires. The IBM chip is less than a quarter the size of a dime and uses less energy, thereby generating less heat.

According to IBM, the transceiver is fast enough to reduce the download time for a typical high definition feature-length movie to a single second compared to 30 minutes or more. This breakthrough would surely transform how data is accessed, shared and used across the Web for corporate and consumer networks.

The technology could be integrated onto printed circuit boards to allow the components within an electronic system -- such as a PC or set top box -- to communicate among them at a much faster speed, enhancing the performance of the system itself.

The transceiver chipset is designed to enable low cost optics by attaching to an optical printed circuit board employing densely spaced polymer waveguide channels using mass assembly processes. This compact design provides both a high number of communications channels as well as very high speeds per channel, resulting in an highest ever amount of information transmitted per unit area of card space taken up by the chipset.