Bach Seat

The EETimes reports that researchers at Intel Corp. (INTC) have demonstrated optical chips can transmit up to terabit-per-second of data transmission. The new silicon photonic chips will replace copper connections in everything from supercomputers to servers to PCs chips predicts Intel. The new chips can currently transmit data at 50 Gigabits per second (Gbps). 50 Gbps equates to transferring an HD movie a second.

“This milestone marks the beginning of silicon photonics in the high-volume marketplace, in applications from [high-performance computing] all the way down to the client PC,” said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab. “We see a clear development path from 50 Gbps today to a terabit in the future,” Mr. Paniccia told EETimes.

Intel says that optical connections could eventually replace the copper connections between systems and even between boards in the same system and down to cores on the same board. intel’s Paniccia estimated that the first commercial applications of silicon photonics will begin appearing in as little as five years in data centers and supercomputer facilities.

The modulators required to encode optical information using signal waveguides and photodiodes are cast in silicon on custom chips designed by Intel. The transmitter chip uses Intel’s hybrid silicon laser technology that bonds a small indium phosphide die to on-chip silicon waveguides, four of which are patterned into a connected optical laser.  “We combined our silicon manufacturing techniques with our hybrid laser and demonstrated an integrated transmitter using four lasers each operating at a different wavelengths and four silicon modulators each operating at 12.5 Gbps, then combined them together into an aggregate 50 Gbps into the optical fiber,” said Paniccia.

The optical fiber output on the receiver chip is then filtered into separate colors and diverted by waveguides into four separate photodiodes, each of which receives one of the four separate 12.5-Gbps channels. In the future, Intel plans to add more lasers per chip and increase the number of channels. Intel believes that it can put 25 lasers on a single chip to produce the 1 Tbps capabilities. It then hopes to commercialize the optical connection technology.  Intel has been developing the technology since 2004.

Intel already has a 10-Gbps Light Peak chip that uses conventional optical technologies that are aimed at reducing the number of port connections on a computer. The Silicon Photonics Link is different from Light Peak technology. Intel’s Light Peak technology – an optical cable that is aimed at reducing the number of port connections on a computer. said it used traditional optical devices and scaling it beyond 10 Gbps speeds would be difficult.

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For some perspective, the 1 terabit per second link could transfer the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in 1.5 minutes.

Intel is preaching high bandwidth and low cost with these chips. If Intel can deliver, it could change the nature of system design. Theoretically, these chips could allow system components to the spaced further apart without the performance hit. With these chips, data center expansion could be down the hall instead of a full re-design. Now it may be cheaper to take the new gear to the available electrical panel rather than adding a new panel to the server room.

Intel’s Paniccia told VentureBeat that the accuracy of the data transfer is superb. So far, it has been proven to be able to transfer data with no errors for 27 hours straight, which means it can transfer more than a petabyte of data without an error.

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.