Intel’s Optical Breakthrough Holds Promise of Staggering Speeds [Intel]

Transfer a song for your phone. Seems pretty fast, right? Now imagine transferring the whole printed catalog of the Library of Congress in a minute and a half. Intel says they\’ve got the technology to make it happen (eventually).

Intel detailed their breakthrough to the click at an event today, marking the milestone of impressive 50 gigabits per second transfer speeds using an underlying technology which could go much, much further. We\’ve covered the promise of fiber optic speeds before, but nothing like this. Intel CTO Justin Rattner explained just what \” silicon photonics\” even means, why the area needs it, and what it promises inside the near future.

Silicon photonics is, simply, the mix of optical technology with traditional silicon chip manufacturing techniques-an identical processes used to make all of our CPUs and GPUs. By employing existing methods, turning data into light and back again will probably be affordable.

The fundamental process is that of transferring data by converting electrons-which can be what make the device you\’re reading this on right away work-into photons. Intel\’s photonic technology uses a blinding bit of engineering-and I do mean dazzling, as we\’re on the size of your fingernail-to encode data into laser streams. These streams converge into one, and travel along a fiberoptic strand to their destination, where they may be decoded from light back into electrons.

Why would we want anything as complicated and complicated as this? The very fact of the matter is that we\’re nearing the limit of what we will do with electrons-and there\’s no arguing with physics. When we get inside the realm of 10 gigabit transfer speeds, we\’ve pushed copper wiring about as far as it is going to go without degrading the signal beyond usefulness. And with the mind boggling volume of information swirling around-HD movies, lossless audio, high resolution photos-what may appear excessive today might be essential earlier than we predict.

Intel\’s fiber connection, then again, can take us farther and faster. Immensely so. At the velocity Intel has announced today, you can download an HD film from iTunes or 100 hours of music in not up to a second. And if they reach their theoretical potential of 1 terabit per second, you’ll slurp down three seasons of an HD show or backup the entire harddrive within the same amount of time.

Rattner said Intel hopes to have silicon photonics \” widely deployed\” by mid-decade, though holding one\’s breath in cases like it’s usually a nasty idea. We asked Intel, after hearing them tout the benefits silicon photonics offers for consumer devices, whether shall we expect to peer this technology replacing USB within this timeframe, prompting them to emphasize that the significance of the breakthrough is in its potential, not its concrete applications-commercial adoption will hinge in the marketplace and manufacturing factors. Still, they have got proven the technology works, and works well. For now, I will be able to safely say that they have got preemptively ruined USB 3.0 for me. [Intel Silicon Photonics Research]

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This post is tagged: breakthrough, Holds, Intel, Intels, optical, promise, Speeds, Staggering