Mary-Louise Hoffman
IBM has developed and tested a silicon photonics chip designed to use tiny optical fibers and light pulses to move huge amounts of data between computing systems.
The company believes its complementary metal-oxide semiconductor integrated nanophotonics technology could help industry manufacture optical transceivers capable of transferring information at 100 gigabits per second, IBM said Tuesday.
“Making silicon photonics technology ready for widespread commercial use will help the semiconductor industry keep pace with ever-growing demands in computing power driven by big data and cloud services,†said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director of IBM’s research business.
The company estimates that silicon-based microchips can facilitate sharing of as many as six million images in just one second or downloading of a full high-definition movie in about two seconds.
During a recent demonstration, the IBM chip employed four laser colors and worked to allow engineers to transmit and receive data at a high speed rate through datacenter interconnects.
IBM will provide further details on the technology at the Conference on Lasers and Electro Optics this week in San Jose, California.
