IBM (News - Alert) Researchers today unveiled a prototype technology that could bring massive amounts of bandwidth in an energy efficient way to all kinds of machines -- from supercomputers to cell phones.

 

IBM claims that the new technology could “revolutionize the way people access, use and share information across many different applications.”

 

IBM officials explained that the new technology uses light instead of wires to send information and could allow, for example, the transmission of 8 trillion bits (terabits) per second of information -- equivalent to about 5,000 high-definition video streams -- using the power of a single 100-watt lightbulb.

 

IBM believes that this kind of bandwidth can drive energy efficiencies inside of datacenters and speed the sharing of large datasets, whether it’s scientists crunching data to discover new drugs and forecast the weather, people sharing high-definition movies, doctors sending high-definition medical images to a specialist in seconds for diagnoses, or bringing the power of high-definition to mobile phones.

 

The applications for this technology range from cell phones to supercomputers and span industries from consumer electronics to healthcare, according to officials.

 

Consistent with green computing initiatives, the new optical technology could save massive amounts of power in supercomputers. Officials pointed out that for a typical

100 meter long link, the power consumed by the optical technology is 100 times less than today’s electrical interconnects, and offers a power savings of 10 times over current commercial optical modules.

 

This prototype “green optical link”, according to officials, is designed to meet the bandwidth requirements for peta- and exa-flop supercomputing. Also, the new technology puts optical chips and optical data buses in a single package with standard components.

 

“Last year we unveiled an optical transceiver chip-set that could transmit a high-definition movie in under a second using highly customized optical components and processes,” said Clint Schow, researcher at IBM, part of the team that built the prototype.

 

He also said in a statement that just a year later, “we've now connected those high speed chips through printed circuit boards with dense integrated optical wiring.”

 

He stated that now BM has built an even faster transceiver and have moved the optical components away from custom devices to more standard parts procured from a volume manufacturer, taking an important step toward commercializing the technology.

 

 

Explaining the tech specifications behind this green optical network technology, Schow said that the optically-enabled circuit boards, or “Optocards,” employ an array of low-loss polymer optical waveguides to conduct light between transmitters and receivers.

 

And, the complete databus constructed with these Optocards not only incorporates a large number of high-speed channels, but also closely packs them to achieve unprecedented density. In addition, the packaging approach for the complete system utilizes hybrid chip integration to produce a highly integrated optical module, or “Optochip.”

 

The Optochip is a multi-component 3-D assembly that is constructed with surface mount solder processes similar to those currently used in the mass-production of electrical chips, according to Schow.

 

In addition to the optical data bus, IBM also has developed a parallel optical transceiver module with a higher number of channels and an increased speed of operation: 24 transmitters and 24 receivers that each operate at 12.5 Gb/s.