IBM Debuts Optical Transceiver Chipset

IBM debuted a new optical transceiver chipset today that researchers within the company promise will allow users to download data eight times faster than current technology. IBM cited the rising demand for digital media such as movies as the driving force behind the new technology. "IBM says it can meet that need, building its new chipset by making an optical transceiver with standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology, and combining that with optical components crafted from exotic materials such as indium phosphide and gallium arsenide. The resulting package is just 3.25mm by 5.25mm in size, small enough to be integrated onto a printed circuit board."

Comments

Replace your SATA cable

[Weaselmancer]

IBM tech promises 160Gb/s downloads

Net speed is nice, but I think these would also make excellent replacements for SATA. Especially when we get those nifty zero-seek time solid state flash drives. Currently, a SATA cable tops out at 3GB/s.

Re:Replace your SATA cable

[Grishnakh]

So what? The disc can't physically read more than that data rate off the platters, so what's the point of having that much speed? Without some major advance, it's unlikely that hard drives will need anything faster than 3 Gb/s for a while. Maybe when we have some kind of super-fast holographic storage, this might be more important.

There's several good reasons we have SATA: it's fast enough (actually, much more than fast enough; do any drives read faster than 100 MB/s? 3 Gb/s = 375 MB/s), it's easy to use, has small cables which don't impede airflow, and best of all it's cheap. Do you really want to put an optical interface on your hard drive which costs more than the rest of the drive? I'd rather not return to the days of $1000-3000 hard drives.

Re:Replace your SATA cable

[Grishnakh]

This is interesting tech nonetheless, i'm sure it will come in handy in a few years if produced in sufficiently high numbers to keep production cost low enough, ibm makes the comm standard open for all OEM manufacturers, and sticks to simply selling the chip in bulk.

I agree; this is why I mentioned in another post of mine that this technology makes sense for other applications, such as high-speed interconnects in a supercomputing cluster or data center. But it doesn't make any sense at all for some other things people are bringing up, like 1) hard drive interfaces, or 2) fiber-to-the-home.



I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't a big reason behind this. But IBM tends to be at the forefront of technology anyway, with things like IC process improvements, quantum physics research, etc. I think some stupid reporter probably spun this article with all the stupid stuff about transferring movies and such, instead of talking about what the real applications for this tech would be.

Re:Gallium arsenide "exotic?"

[thpr]

Practically every device that communicates wirelessly at microwave frequencies has GaAs amplifiers

Five years ago, you were right. Not anymore.

SiGe is killing GaAs.

Many of the devices communicating in the higher frequences of the microwave range are based on Silicon Germanium. This includes cell phones.

Almost ALL WiFi radios are SiGe [PDF warning]. Some have even moved to RFCMOS.

Most GPS devices are SiGe.

Oh, and TV Tuners, too.

Gallium Arsenide *is* exotic, because it has to be done in specialized fabs, not those that run silicon wafers. That significantly drives up the cost vs. SiGe and RFCMOS.

Re:Investment and profit

[heinousjay]

In what way?

Faster interconnects between components would be the obvious answer.

You're making it out to be way more than it is. The taxpayers paid for it. How do you act like IBM is doing them a favor?

I don't even know what this means. I don't think IBM is doing favors for anyone except IBM shareholders. I also think that's just fine and dandy.

You can give that up now. Even MH42 has begun to realize that my observations have been correct.

I don't know MH42. I don't care about MH42's opinions. I don't even care if every other observation you've ever made in your life has been correct. This rant is half-baked.

And it was taxpayer funded to begin with, and nobody is cutting the taxpayers any breaks on subscriber fees.

That's a complete non sequitur. The development was taxpayer funded. The continuing operation is not. Even if it were, that wouldn't be a break, it would be paying the subscription fees through a different collector.

Look, just boil your arguments down to their core: you hate profit. You hate the idea of people making money. Good. We get it. Too bad for you, it's not going away anytime soon.