Intel's Light Peak Will Replace Copper Wires

September 24, 2009 by John Messina weblog
Light Peak Module

Enlarge

Light Peak module with 4 fibers. Each fiber capable of carrying data at 10 gigabits per second. Credit: Intel

(PhysOrg.com) -- At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco Wednesday, the company announced a new optical cable that will be able to transfer data, between electrical devices, starting at speeds of 10 gigabits per second.

Vice president, Dadi Perlmutter, of Intel's Mobility Group, hopes to ship an optical , called Light Peak, by 2010. Light Peak will first be introduced into the market as being able to transfer data at 10 gigabits per second. Future versions will be able to transfer data at 40 and 100 gigabits per second as the manufacturing process becomes cheaper.

A single Light Peak cable will be capable of transporting multiple types of data simultaneously such as transferring data to a hard drive, connecting to the internet and transferring video.

Each end of the Light Peak cable will be connected to chips that contain light producing devices, encode data, and transmit data. The chips will also amplify data and convert the light to electrical signals.

Researchers are hopeful that silicon photonics will eventually replace copper wires on motherboards and microprocessors by making high-bandwidth connectors cheaper.

The first generation of Light Peak cables will use the same type of optical chips used in telecommunication devices today. Intel will be able to drive down the cost of these chips because the manufacturing standards are less stringent.

The lasers and detectors inside the chips are not required to be high performing. The chips don't need to transmit data over great distances as required in the telecommunication industry.

Intel is currently working with other companies to form partnerships. Sony is supportive of Intel's Light Peak technology, with more announcements coming.

Additional information can be found at Intel's Tech Research

Via: Technology Review

© 2009 PhysOrg.com

view popular send feedback to editors
4.5 /5 (34 votes)  

Filter


Move the slider to adjust rank threshold, so that you can hide some of the comments.


Display comments: newest first

h20dr
Sep 24, 2009

Rank: not rated yet
This is not new technology; just an application on a smaller scale but it will have huge implications for personal communication devices as miniaturization of electronics continues to scale down towards the nano level.
El_Nose
Sep 24, 2009

Rank: 4 / 5 (1)
May not be new - per se but this is something intel has been researching for like 7 years. This FINALLY coming to a mobo near you means removing a rather insignificant bottle neck on PC's but a larger one on the huge corp servers. If these can be used in conjunction with gigabitwifi and sharing of memory across boxes and cpu's may be a great boon to parallel computing
E_L_Earnhardt
Sep 24, 2009

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Current power transfer is by electron. Insert one into the orbit of an atom and one drops out of the orbit of another miles away. Photons may be faster,
but "fade" is a long-distance limiting problem. We lose a lot of light between here and the sun!
Bob_Kob
Sep 25, 2009

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Does a harddrive even have the capacity to read or write at 10 gigabits per second?
Roj
Sep 25, 2009

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
capable of transporting multiple types of data.. such as transferring data to a hard drive..


If these devices are still booting from hard drives, rather than solid state memory, its a Marketing Gimmick.

Unless of course there's a window carved out of the tower so we can watch the blinking lights.
guiding_light
Sep 25, 2009

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
I have a couple doubts about this otherwise hopeful technology.

First is the power consumption of the light sources (they can't be that efficient). Second 3D interconnects make more sense (less distance to travel, less power) and save space.
plasma_guy
Sep 25, 2009

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
It looks like a step in the wrong direction, being more wiring, albeit different type. I don't see this working well among motherboards for personal devices, maybe server arrays.
lengould100
Sep 25, 2009

Rank: 3 / 5 (2)
This is cute, but not going to change anything for personal users. short-distance links are alredy faster than anyone uses, its those plodding unreliable "last mile" links which need fixing.
Anyone
Sep 25, 2009

Rank: 1 / 5 (2)
Re: "fade", E_L_Earnhardt -- not at all the same kind of thing; not at all the same distance; not the same wavelength; the only common factor between the two is photons. try Google, polymer optic fiber.

Re: hard drive I/O, Bob Kob -- not to my knowledge, for magneto-mechanical types. as was mentioned, probably use SSDs.

Re: power consumption, 'guiding light' -- yes, they can, especially at short distance. try Google -- VCSELs, also LEDs. Intel likely will use VCSELs.

Re: 'wrong direction', 'plasma guy' -- no technical reason to doubt it, if Intel can reduce manufacturing and assembly cost. One big issue is alignment of emitter with fiber. One way to mitigate that is with large core polymer fiber.

Re: 'last mile link', lengould100 -- agreed, there must be sufficient demand, sufficiently large end-use need to justify this kind of upgrade. it's not clear to me what that demand or end-use will be, aside from switch rooms and back-office for now.

p.s. -- I don't work for Intel
guiding_light
Sep 25, 2009

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Anyone, if you're trying to take the signal over a long distance (like meters) optical is indeed compelling, but I cannot agree for chip-scale you want to add an electrical-to-optical conversion unit. Not if I can use an equally wide (multi-micron scale) copper via.
Husky
Sep 26, 2009

Rank: not rated yet
How about linking 32GPU's spread over several pc's with your optical cable in a virtual crossfire setup, finally getting a decent framerate in farcry2 or realtime raytracing in ultra HD ?

Or,

A huge Raid on wich you store a 1000 virtual machines and a pagefile to swap them in and out of your memory for a few milliseconds, so it looks as if you got them running local all at once on just a server with 1 board and 4 gig mem, wich shouldn't normally be possible. This could shift the cost from buying more rackservers AND userspace/ storage to just 1 or 2 fast servers and userspace

Bob_Kob
Sep 26, 2009

Rank: not rated yet
I thought that this would have been common practice on servers and the like, and that this tech was specifically for user end applications now.
Arikin
Sep 28, 2009

Rank: 5 / 5 (2)
El_Nose, fiber-optic connections between servers is being done now. Right now they use it between the servers and say a disk array. Sun is doing it and some others.

This is a nice idea. But they moved the bottle neck from the motherboard to the devices again. Until the encoding and decoding is removed and the light is used by the devices directly then your faster speed isn't going to be realized.

There are already boards out there that can match or beat the devices input/output speeds. So no real advantage with this setup.
Anyone
Sep 28, 2009

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Re: distance, 'guiding light' -- VIAs, and the like, are part of the problem with copper interconnect at chip-scale. people are talking about 40 - 100Gbps now (802.3ba); no clear indication when there will be a market. people need to decide when the cost of fine-tuning copper interconnect and use of exotic dielectric material will meet or exceed the cost of optics, then choose.

Re: bottleneck, Arikin -- correct. I bet it's legacy issues with the (now) older copper interconnect (e.g. - baseline wander and jitter). perhaps this would be an avoidable problem if there weren't a need for backwards-compatability.
otto1923
Sep 28, 2009

Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Does a harddrive even have the capacity to read or write at 10 gigabits per second?
Mechanical rotating or switching parts and pieces are dead end tech. The goal would be completely solid state, multi-layered, nano-engineered and assembled, 3D interconnected, flexible, disposable card pda phones, folios, screens, and bricks. No movable, fixable, or replacable parts.
freelanc3r
Sep 30, 2009

Rank: not rated yet
Forgive my ignorance on some of the more technical aspects involved in this, but if one were to replace the copperwiring found on most consumer motherboards with polymer optic fiber wouldn't that also cut down on a lot of heat generated by the computer? If not a lot, at least quite a bit as well as prep the standard PC for the next round of upgrades for performance and speed by allowing faster interfaces with each of the components?
guiding_light
Oct 01, 2009

Rank: not rated yet
Well no one is going to argue the worsening problems of staying with copper. The trouble with optics is you can't make it smaller than micron scale. To collect data from the hundreds of transistors within the area occupied by the optical element, you still need individual copper wires, which overwhelm the benefit offered by the optical part. For scales of mm, cm upward, you have to consider the signal integrity and power of the light source over such scales. So, in short, there is still going to be an incompatibility of scales between chips and cables.
Rank 4.5 /5 (34 votes)
Tags

light peak, cable, microprocessor, copper wires, telecommunication devices, telecommunication industry, silicon photonics, gigabit
Related Stories
more news
Relevant PhysicsForums posts
  • Need help reading 3-D
    created19 hours ago
  • A way to send and receive wireless data
    createdFeb 11, 2012
  • Calling function with no input argument
    createdFeb 10, 2012
  • Force free body diagram problem on gym equipment
    createdFeb 10, 2012
  • Empirical data regarding shower heads and water
    createdFeb 10, 2012
  • feed hold button on CNC lathe
    createdFeb 09, 2012
  • More from Physics Forums - General Engineering

More news stories

Iran blocks email, restricts net access: reports

Iran has further restricted access to the Internet and blocked popular email services for the past few days, in a move a top lawmaker said could "cost the regime dearly," media reports said on Sunday.

Technology / Internet

created 1 minute ago | popularity not rated yet | comments 0

Google might launch Drive for cloud storage soon

(PhysOrg.com) -- Google's next big move, according to the Wall Street Journal, is a cloud storage service called Drive. Hardly first to the plate, Google is simply catching up to introducing its cloud reposi ...

Technology / Internet

created 7 hours ago | popularity 4.7 / 5 (3) | comments 3 | with audio podcast report

Love a click away in Indonesia's Twitter Republic

He was a geeky kid from Yogyakarta, she a glamorous city girl in Jakarta. In a country with one of the world's most vibrant social networking scenes they fell in love on Twitter.

Technology / Internet

created 8 hours ago | popularity 4 / 5 (1) | comments 0

Europeans protest controversial Internet pact

Tens of thousands of people marched in protests in more than a dozen European cities Saturday against a controversial anti-online piracy pact that critics say could curtail Internet freedom.

Technology / Internet

created 23 hours ago | popularity 4.6 / 5 (10) | comments 2

Walney offshore wind farm is world's biggest (for now)

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Walney wind farm on the Irish Sea--characterized by high tides, waves and windy weather--officially opened this week. The farm is treated in the press as a very big deal as the Walney ...

Technology / Energy & Green Tech

created Feb 11, 2012 | popularity 4 / 5 (11) | comments 35 | with audio podcast weblog


Scientists discover molecular secrets of 2,000-year-old Chinese herbal remedy

For roughly two thousand years, Chinese herbalists have treated Malaria using a root extract, commonly known as Chang Shan, from a type of hydrangea that grows in Tibet and Nepal. More recent studies suggest that halofuginone, ...

New method to examine batteries -- MRI from the inside

There is an ever-increasing need for advanced batteries for portable electronics, such as phones, cameras, and music players, but also to power electric vehicles and to facilitate the distribution and storage of energy derived ...

A mitosis mystery solved: How chromosomes align perfectly in a dividing cell

Although the process of mitotic cell division has been studied intensely for more than 50 years, Whitehead Institute researchers have only now solved the mystery of how cells correctly align their chromosomes during symmetric ...

Starve a virus, feed a cure? Findings show how some cells protect themselves against HIV

A protein that protects some of our immune cells from the most common and virulent form of HIV works by starving the virus of the molecular building blocks that it needs to replicate, according to research published online ...

Researchers find extensive RNA editing in human transcriptome

In a new study published online in Nature Biotechnology, researchers from BGI, the world's largest genomics organization, reported the evidence of extensive RNA editing in a human cell line by analysis of RNA-seq data, demons ...

The proteins ensuring genome protection

Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have discovered the crucial role of two proteins in developing a cell 'anti-enzyme shield'. This protection system, which operates at the level of molecular ...