The much known and preferred chipmaker Intel has with its persistent and persevered efforts achieved a goal it had long aspired. It has now given life to an idea which was merely an idea till now. It will now be able to replace copper wiring with light by creating a steady, 50Gbps link between two devices; all this using fibre optics. The innovation which has been baptized as “Silicon Photonics” is the basis for a fibre optic network which is believed to be capable of being scaled up to 1Tbps for data transfers over wide area or device to device connections. A day might soon come when these photonics will be able to replace copper interconnects in electronic systems.
It was the research conducted with UC Barbara to develop hybrid silicon lasers which was the driving force behind this innovation. By developing a bond between indium phosphide and silicon with a unique process along with carefully defined gratings in silicon waveguides; designers are able to create different wavelength solid state emitters if they manipulate the defining pattern. These tiny lasers then generate light which is guided along various defined channels and modulated with tiny silicon modulators. These modulators have usually stepped down from a few hundred megahertz at the beginning of millennium till the current versions which are capable of working at high frequencies good enough to transfer data with a speed of 40Gbps on a single channel. Mixing together separate channels and then sending them along a single fibre optic is how it works. The receiving device demixes the separate wavelength and feeds them into separate photo-detectors for decoding.
The Intel implementation uses four hybrid silicon lasers at different wavelengths encoded at 12.5Gbps each for a total of 50Gbps throughput. A bit-error rate of less that 3e-15 makes it very effective.
Magic is all it seems
Yes, indeed it’s magical. Intel says that by increasing the number of lasers or by increasing the encoding speed, the bandwidth can be scaled up. For example, a speed of 1Tbps can be achieved by using 25 channels at 40Gbps. At 50Gbps, you could download an entire movie in just 1 second! Isn’t it a boon for all the movie freaks? And at a speed of 1Tbps, you could download 3 whole seasons of your favourite sitcom! Friends, Two and a Half Men, How I met your Mother, Glee, Lost, Desperate Housewives? Watch whatever you want just with a click! Obviously by the time you’d take your finger off the mouse, the episodes would have been downloaded!
All said; the company plans to undergo a mass production and deploy the work widely by 2015. Currently Intel is trying to develop a high-volume manufacturing process which also optimizes power, packaging and assembly. And as far as reliability is concerned; Intel doesn’t foresee any fundamental issues.
Though for now Silicon Photonics is used only for device to device transfers, the technology could soon be used to move data from one chip to another; whatever device it is; a Pc or a mobile phone.
With the people getting busier that they wish there were more hours to a day instead of the usual 24; and the growing electricity bills, a person wants faster data transfers to save both time and money. Intel’s Silicon Photonics are going to be the answer it seems.
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