Bored form the slow surfing speed? The speed that can act as a mother’s lullabye, while you surf and search anything; get ready to say it goodbye. After crossing the Megabit and Gigabit band, Intel is now planning to make it to the Terabits level. Sounds impossible…doesn’t it?
As now, it was intel the last time too and the speed reached was 40 Gbps, back in 2007 and now they have hit the 50 Gbps mark. Definitely and obviously, copper wires can provide a maximum speed of 400 Mbps. So, for speeds in the order of Gigabits, Silicon Photonics and integrated lasers can help.
With these, light pulses can be used to provide a data transfer rate of upto 50 Gbps. Some certain things are emphasised at such as low cost fibre-optics but high speed is not compromised. Experimenting with the new system designs by the changing the orientation of chips and components, without effecting the speed much, are some other aims.
This achievement of the world’s first 50Gbps silicon photonics link with integrated hybrid silicon lasers marks a significant achievement in our long term vision of ‘siliconizing’ photonics and bringing high bandwidth, low cost optical communications in and around future PCs, servers, and consumer devices.
Won’t be wrong if i say that the light beams are expected to replace the electronic signals, in near future. This shall not only provide amazingly faster communication (the situtaions when it is used for video conferencing and for telemedicine) and a high resolution as well; hence displaying virtuality as a reality.
[via Engadget]