IBM Invention: Super Fast Green Optical Network Technology With Speeds Upto 8Tb/s

IBM Researchers have developed a breakthrough prototype “Green Optical Link” technology which could be considered as the future of bandwidth transfers. The new technology uses light instead of wires to send and receive information and can transmit 8 trillion bits per second and that too consuming power as little as required by a 100W lightbulb.

This prototype “green optical link” is designed to meet the increasing bandwidth requirements for peta- and exa-flop supercomputing. The new technology puts optical chips and optical data buses in a single package with standard components. These optically enabled circuit boards called Optocards employ optical waveguides to conduct light between transmitter and receivers.

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.

“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 IBM Researcher Clint Schow, part of the team that built the prototype. “Just a year later, we’ve now connected those high speed chips through printed circuit boards with dense integrated optical ‘wiring.’ Now we have 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.”

The invented technology is said to be the fastest and the most integrated data bus which can be used for an unprecedented bandwidth performance and will finds applications in areas like High-definition content, Consumer electronics, Massive Bandwidth for Supercomputing and much more.