Lasers will replace copper connections in everything from supercomputers to servers to PCs, according to Intel researchers who demonstrated 50-Gb/s optical transmitter and receiver chips that the company plans to scale up to terabit-per-second speeds prior to commercialization, reports EE Times.
“This is the first completed photonic link with integrated lasers,” said Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technical officer, during a conference call. The optical fiber output on the receiver chip was filtered into separate colors, then diverted by waveguides into four separate photodiodes, each of which recovered one of the four separate 12.5-Gbit per second channels.
Intel said that its efforts were different from its “Light Peak” technology, which also uses a short length of optical cable combined with a transceiver at each end. Light Peak is designed to “bring a multi-protocol 10Gbps optical connection to Intel client platforms for nearer-term applications,” Intel said. In the case of the 10-Gbit/s transceiver, Intel said, the goal was to bring it to “an even broader set of high-volume applications”.
Intel’s announcement comes about 50 years after the introduction of the laser, Rattner noted. The laser was patented by Bell Labs in 1960.
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