Welcome fiber inside computers?

Jul 25, 2007 09:32 GMT  ·  By

There are some things that changed little or not at all since the first compatible x86 computer rolled out the assembly line. Other things change many times with the years, while other simply disappeared and were replaced by other hardware parts and standards.

One of the most stable things in the entire computer industry was that every piece of discrete hardware (except highly integrated circuit ones) needs some copper wiring to link together different electronic components. Well, it looks like this is about to change too as Intel researchers announced a new silicon based modulator that can pass 40GB of data in a second, a record that surely lets copper wiring hang out in the rain.

Over the classical copper wiring, a computer using a fiber bus uses photons to transfer data and not electrons, which are much slower. One other thing is that photons inside the fiber give no heat at all, so a computer using such a bus will be cooler and maybe it will need less energy to operate. Until now, the main downside of this approach was that the components needed were big, expensive and tricky to operate. The Intel's modulator tries to address these issues and the first prototype was built in 2004 and was capable of transmitting 1GB of data per second. It was being upgraded one year later to 10GB of data per second and now it reached an impressive four times more dataflow.

The News.com site cites project leader Ansheng Liu explaining the process: "The intensity of the light transmitted through the Mach-Zehnder interferometer is modulated by modulating the phase difference between the interferometer's two arms". Intel is not the first company to invest in the development of fiber-based data flow solution for computers. Primarion, IBM and many others have already expressed their interest in a technology that could be integrated into computers and replace the metal wiring.