Fast fiber: Light Peak module with four fibers, each capable of carrying 10 gigabits of data per second.
Intel
A new kind of optical cable will provide ultrafast connections between electronic devices.
There's a reason that the Internet backbone is made of fiber-optic cables: photons transport bits of information faster than electrons. But while photons and fiber are the most efficient way of sending data across continents, it's still cheaper and easier to use electrons in copper wiring for most data transfer over shorter distances.
Now Intel plans to sell inexpensive cables with fiber-optic-caliber speed to connect, for instance, a laptop and an external hard drive, or a phone and a desktop computer. At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco Wednesday, the company announced a new type of optical cable that it hopes will be fast, cheap, and thin enough to make it an attractive replacement for multiple copper wires.
By 2010, says Dadi Perlmutter, vice president of Intel's mobility group, the company hopes to ship an optical cable called Light Peak that will be able to zip 10 gigabits of data per second from one gadget to another, a rate equivalent of transferring a Blu-ray movie from a computer to a mobile video player in 30 seconds. A single Light Peak cable will also be capable of transporting different types of data simultaneously, meaning it will be possible to back up a hard drive, transfer high-definition video, and connect to a network with just one line.
At both ends of a Light Peak cable are chips that contain devices that produce light, encode data in it, and send it on its way. The chips can also amplify incoming signals and convert the light to an electrical signal that can be interpreted by gadgets. The first generation of Light Peak will use chips made with standard optical materials such as gallium arsenide. However, to truly make optical cables cheap enough to replace copper, future versions of Light Peak, which will handle 40-gigabits-per-second and 100-gigabits-per-second transfer rates, will most likely need to rely on silicon-based optical chips, a product of the maturing field of silicon photonics. Silicon photonics researchers hope to transform computing by making high-bandwidth connectors cheaper than ever before, not just in cables, but also eventually within electronic motherboards and microprocessors.
"This will be a long-term transition," says Perlmutter, referring to the fact that it takes years to develop and adopt standards for new connecting technologies. On stage during his IDF keynote, he held up in one hand a bundle of cables he currently lugs around with his laptop, and in the other, a thin, white Light Peak prototype cable. "I have a very light notebook," he said, "but carry a huge amount of cables with me."
Replacing metal wiring with fiber optics could change everything from supercomputers to laptops.
Chips that let errors happen, then correct them, use less power overall.
An energy-efficient silicon device compresses light to make ultrafast signals.
Silacon proposed to Franklin Signal four years ago using fiber optic wires to transmit signals within circuit boards. Franklin demonstrated short distance application of the technique.
What I failing to comprehend is why people are turning to a very fragile product to replace copper. True, while copper is slower, it can at least BEND before it breaks. Optical fibers just break, as they are made of glass.
Optical fiber is great for long distances, as you don't need repeater sites, but if you run them over with a HMMWV, they will snap in half. Ethernet on the other hand, being made of copper, can get run over, and still function, as it is a malleable material. I congratulate Intel on their ingenuity and courage to bring something new to the table, but optics and copper are probably better off the way they are utilized now.
EDIT: By the way, khairulsyahir, I see where you are coming from. I have into the same problems with multiplexers. It doesn't matter how fast your pathway is (for example, a CV-FOM that runs 8192 kb/s), if the original device cannot transmit that much information that fast (an FCC-100, which runs at 2048 kb/s). I've seen it, and it is vastly redundant, unless you plan to upgrade the system, or run multiple systems through it (multiplexing multiplexers, what a laugh).
A Silicon Valley start up, Silicon Pipe, demonstrated copper capable of 10 to 20 Gbps data rates over distances up to 1 meter at relatively low power through a differential pair by making connections direct from chip to chip or chip to connector. They also described a path to high speed memory. There was a multi-company paper presented on the technology at DesignCon a few years ago.
Since copper is robust, as was mentioned, and there will be need for copper for power, ground and lower speed circuits anyway, it is uncertain of what the advantage might be. (at this time, that is...)
Re: Copper shown good to 10G also
Copper introduces a delay in the signal relative to glass in fiber optics as the signal propagation is slower at the same data rate.
Re: Copper shown good to 10G also
The electric field travels through copper at about 75% the speed of light in free space. Light in the fiber travels at 70% the speed of light in free space. In reality, the propogation delay of fiber and copper are both in the range of 1 to 1.5 ns per foot.
If there is a USB connector on both ends, then it shouldn't really matter what's inside the cable itself.
A USB 3.0 (480Mbit)cable with copper conductors for the signal, OR a USB 10Gbit cable with electronics embedded in the connector at both ends, but linked by optical fibers in between.
Years back Sony had plans on marketing a Hard Disk Drive using a sealed Optical media instead of the traditional Magnetic platter. As long as they supplied a standard ATA-IDE interface, what was inside the drive package, was none of your business!
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.
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khairulsyahir
3 Comments
Speed bottleneck
I am wondering if the Light Peak will give any significant advantage for current and near-future devices, seeing that the storage and memory components in electronic devices nowadays have far less writing and reading speed? The USB2.0 boasts 400+ MB/s transfer speed, but we barely reach 10% of that speed in actual operation of an external hard drive, for example.
Sure, 10GB/s sounds impressive, but will there be any useful application of it now or let's say in 3 - 5 years' time?
Reply
Guest (michel.jansens@ulb.ac.be)
Re: Speed bottleneck
Well, actually USB2 has a raw capacity of 480Mbits/second.
Remove the protocol overhead and you are sensibly below that number.
Most usual 1TB SATA2 disks can saturate this connection in burst read.
SATA2 in itself provides up to 3Gbits/sec
That's why USB3 is coming soon.
But length of cable will never beat fiber.
Reply
khairulsyahir
3 Comments
Re: Speed bottleneck
True, but still, the bottleneck remains inside the hard disk itself. How much use can we make of a 3Gbit/s connection if the read/write head inside the hard disk can only work as fast as 20 - 40MBytes/s?
Reply
justahick
19 Comments
Re: Speed bottleneck
True, but where hard disks are replaced by SSDs, such as in many racks of servers, I could see how this would increase throughput.
Also, it should help with keeping temperature lower inside the server, which should help with reducing power and cooling costs, although the article does not mention the power requirements, which seems to be an odd omission.
Down the road further, I'd like to see multi-wavelength photonic interconnects both between the cores in a CPU, and the memory they use.
Reply
rudnric
4 Comments
Re: Speed bottleneck
Speed Bottleneck doesnt have a clue about USB or HDDs.
"The USB2.0 boasts 400+ MB/s transfer speed, but we barely reach 10% of that speed in actual operation of an external hard drive, for example."
Youve got it completely wrong. USB 2.0 is 480 megabits per second (Mbps), not megabytes(MB/s).
Mechanical HDD's have surpassed the bandwidth of USB years ago. Even old HDD's can can hit physical read rates from the media, over 50MB/s. Effective transfer rate of USB 2.0 is only 20-40MB/s tops due to data overhead built into USB protocols, not 60MB/s as the raw data rate of USB 2.0 would suggest. And CPU utilization is also quite high because of that protocol when at maximum data rate.
Reply