4 August 2010—The race to replace copper wiring with optics in chip-to-chip communications reached a new milestone last week as Intel announced it had produced a system using silicon-based photonics to transmit data between printed circuit boards at 50 gigabits per second.
”We’re bringing silicon manufacturing to optical communication,” says Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab. ”It changes the way in the future that we’re going to connect.” Until recently, optical communications was done using exotic semiconductors and other expensive components. Making such systems in silicon should lower their price and allow for easy integration into computers.
The prototype, which was announced at the Integrated Photonics Research Conference in Monterey, Calif., takes several discrete technologies that Intel has invented over the past few years and combines them into one package. These include a hybrid silicon/indium phosphide laser, a silicon modulator operating at 40 Gb/s, and a germanium detector, also operating at 40 Gb/s. The company has brought those together into a four-channel link, with each channel operating at 12.5 Gb/s, for a total bandwidth of 50 Gb/s. ”We’ve always said the real value of silicon photonics is in integration,” Paniccia says.
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