Engineering samples will be available next month with volume production scheduled to commence in the fourth quarter of 2012.

ENGADGET: Newport Media claims tiniest, lowest-power 802.11n WiFi chip yet, smartphones get a little less thirsty

Intel has spent the past two years proving its silicon photonics technology was production-worthy, and has now produced engineering samples.

ENGADGET: Facebook's Open Compute Project splits up monolithic servers with help from Intel, more