TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Intel Spreading High-Speed Fiber Optics Everywhere

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 08-17-10 | Comments

Intel promises to revolutionize communications everywhere from data centers to home networks with a cheap fiber-optic technology that casts photonic devices into cheap silicon chips. Within five years, Intel promises to obsolete copper wires for most communications applications.

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Intel Spreading High-Speed Fiber Optics Everywhere
Today, most communications are carried by copper wires, even though fiber optics are smaller, lighter, faster and higher-speed. The problem is that converting electronic signals to and from optical signals is expensive, since converters require expensive photonic devices using exotic materials like indium gallium arsenide. Now Intel claims to have found a way to create photonic devices that compute with light using the cheap, plentiful silicon techniques it uses to create normal processor chips. Within five years, Intel promises to obsolete copper wires for most communications applications.

For several years now, Intel has been announcing success at crafting various types of photonic devices onto inexpensive silicon chips, including waveguides, modulators, filter gratings, photodiodes and inexpensive hybrid-silicon lasers. Recently, Intel put all the pieces together, demonstrating a 50-gigabit-per-second (G bps) optical fiber connection that could be manufactured at a fraction of the price of existing optical fiber systems.

Mario Paniccia, Intel fellow and director of Photonics Research at Intel Labs, holds the thin optical fiber used to carry data from one end of the 50G Silicon Photonics Link to the other.

Eventually, such optical signals will replace nearly every data pipe that is served today by copper wires, including connections between systems, printed-circuit boards in the same system, chips on the same printed circuit board and eventually even cores on the same chip.

Next: Heavy Copper Wires Soon a Thing of the Past >>