IBM brings in 160-Gbits/s Optical Transceiver
IBM has developed a prototype optical transceiver capable of 160 Gbits/s, the company is expected to announce this week. The optical transceiver is eventually expected to form the heart of an optical chipset that will route data around the system using photons, rather than electrons, to communicate. IBM scientists will announce the prototype at the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference this week in Anaheim, Calif. “The explosion in the amount of data being transferred, when downloading movies, TV shows, music or photos, is creating demand for greater bandwidth and higher speeds in connectivity,” said T.C. Chen, vice president of science and technology at IBM Research. “Greater use of optical communications is needed to address this issue. We believe our optical transceiver technology may provide the answer.”
While the optical transceiver was fabricated using the same CMOS technology used by standard semiconductors, it was combined with other components using more exotic technologies, including indium phosphide (InP) and gallium arsenide (GaAs). The total integrated package only measures 3.25 by 5.25 millimeters in size, IBM said. Kailight Photonics announced the beta release of two new 40Gb/s transponders, the K-WorksTM TRAN-4400 and TRAN-4200, which are currently in trials with several major system vendors. Well, it sounds cool, but now we must somehow persuade our ISPs to adjust the download speed for their clients…
Comments(5)
nice!
i did a big report on GaAs recently (regarding power amplifiers), but it’s really cool to see that they’re trying to use it in computer architecture too!
Wicked.
I wish I could download everything with that speed. I’d need like a few hundred HDD’s to store all the files.
The time of comments never updated with the daylight saving time thinggy i dont think cus they used always be an hour ahead of me now there the same…
Yeah, I was thinking of protesting against shaw for not raising the upload speed as customers want it to be, at least stop being conservative and let it go uncapped and make it go full throttle not just down, but up.