Intel Gets Internal Speeds Humming With Light Pulses [Intel's Silicon Photonics Process Gets Speeds Over 50 Gbps]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Wednesday, 28. July 2010 under: Computers & Computing, Design Concepts, PCs, Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets

For those of you who can’t help but sigh and wish your computer could get up to 50 Gbps transfer rates, you needn’t carry your ennui any longer! No sir, or ma’am as the case may be, Intel’s already getting up in the gigabit range thanks to light pulses.

Sounds baffling, I know, but the folks out at Intel are doing some amazing things with it. They’re working to get the copper wiring out of your future PC and instead replace it with fiber optics. The process is called “silicon photonics”, and it’s getting some incredible rates. It’s developed using an incredibly complex process involving “bond(ing) iridium phosphide to silicon” which lets the light pulses from fiber optics do the work.

And work they do; the theoretical top speed on this system is up in the terabit per second range, and they successfully test out that 50 Gbps level nonstop for 27 hours. Fully one petabyte (a thousand terabytes) had been successfully transmitted without error.

Don’t look for this to hit Best Buy any time soon, folks, but the possibility exists, which means blindingly fast PCs may not be so far off.

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