Intel Claims Breakthrough With 40Gbps Optical Chips

Intel Corp. researchers are a step closer to creating chips that transmit data at high speeds using light inst ead of electrons, but products based on the technology appear to remain over the horizon. On Wednesday, a team of Intel researchers unveiled a laser modulator made of silicon that is capable of encoding data at speeds up to 40G bits per second (bps), a significant increase in speed for the company.

The new modulator, which converts electrical data into light, opens the door to high-speed optical interconnects for computers and, when combined with 25 hybrid silicon lasers on a single chip, could be capable of transmitting terabits of data per second, wrote Ansheng Liu, principal engineer at Intel’s Corporate Technology Group, in a blog post. Optical interconnects are desirable because fiber optics offer more bandwidth and carry data farther than copper, which is currently used to connect chips and move data inside a computer. Because they use laser light to transmit data, optical interconnects also eliminate the heat created by resistance as electrons pass through a copper trace.

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