IBM optical chipset allows instant downloads

IBM researchers showed a prototype optical transceiver chipset Monday they say will allow people to share online data eight times faster than current commercial fiber optic technology allows.

The chipset can move data at 160G bits by representing information as light pulses instead of electrons and could be used for both corporate and consumer applications as soon as 2010, IBM said.

Consumer demand for digital media such as movies, music and photos has caused an explosion in the amount of data being transferred over the Internet, and underlined the need for greater bandwidth and connectivity, said T.C. Chen, vice president for science and technology at IBM Research, in a statement.

IBM says it can meet that need, building its new chipset by making an optical transceiver with standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology, and combining that with optical components crafted from exotic materials such as indium phosphide and gallium arsenide. The resulting package is just 3.25 mm by 5.25 mm in size, small enough to be integrated onto a printed circuit board.

Although all those technologies exist today, it will probably be at least three years until suppliers can produce enough parts for IBM to bring optical transceivers into its product stream, the company said.

When it does arrive, the part could have an immediate impact on applications from computing to communications and entertainment. A PC using that board would be able to reduce the download time of a typical high-definition feature-length movie to just one second, compared to 30 minutes using a typical 100Mb home office Ethernet connection, the company said.

The demand for bandwidth has also pushed other chipmakers to explore optical circuits. In September, researchers at Intel Corp. and the University of California at Santa Barbara said they had discovered how to build low-cost "laser chips"  that move data much faster than standard copper wire interconnects. That could help eliminate the bottleneck of feeding data to processors that are becoming ever faster according to Moore's Law, they said. And in December, IBM said it had found a way to slow down speeding photons, allowing them to store data as light instead of electricity.

IBM did the work with funding from the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Researchers will present details of the project on March 29 in a report at the Optical Fiber Conference in Anaheim, California. The full name of the chipset is the "160Gb/s, 16-channel, full-duplex, single-chip CMOS optical transceiver."

This story was updated on March 28, 2007