News Buzz: World's Fastest Optical Chipset

[From time to time, I can't help noticing some big buzz out there in the world, I told myself, I'd better make a note of it, otherwise I'll forget...]

Now IBM scientists will reveal a prototype optical transceiver chipset capable of reaching speeds at least eight times faster than optical components available today. You've got that? Let me tell you, that means the transceiver is fast enough to reduce the download time for a typical high definition feature-length film to a single second. (One second to download a whole movie!)

The technology could be integrated onto printed circuit boards to allow the components within a PC or set top box -- to communicate much faster. Imagine a world of super fast communication.

The report on this work, “160-Gb/s, 16-Channel Full-Duplex, Single-Chip CMOS Optical Transceiver,” by C.L. Schow, F.E. Doany, O. Liboiron-Ladouceur, C. Baks, D.M. Kuchta, L. Schares, R. John, and J.A. Kash of IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y. will be presented on March 29 at the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference in Anaheim. This work was partially funded by Defense Advanced Research Project Agency through the Chip to Chip Optical Interconnect (C2OI) program.