Intel, the kingpin in microprocessor chips, has also announced a series of milestones in silicon photonics.
Intel has spent the past two years proving its silicon photonics technology was production-worthy, and has now produced engineering samples.
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Elements of the technology, sometimes called silicon photonics, are already beginning to be used for high-speed connections between servers and in scientific systems known as supercomputers.
"Silicon photonics for years was an oxymoron, " said Joe Campbell, a specialist in the field who is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Virginia.
This is an area IBM cares about because the rapid expansion of bandwidth in datacenters is creating many challenges that Silicon Photonics are likely to play a fundamental role in addressing.
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Silicon photonics made with inexpensive silicon rather than expensive and exotic optical materials provides a distinct cost advantage over older optical technologies in addition to providing greater speed, reliability and scalability benefits.
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As we build the next generations of servers and connect them together, we need a technology like Silicon Photonics to leverage that same infrastructure to meet the incredible demand for high-speed data throughput at an acceptable cost.
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Silicon photonics is a new approach to using light (photons) to move huge amounts of data at very high speeds with extremely low power over a thin optical fiber rather than using electrical signals over a copper cable.
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He adds that it will be a while before Intel is selling optical transceivers, checks find that Cisco and other players are likely to launch silicon photonics-based transceivers for 100G applications in the data center in 2013 and 2014.
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"We're excited about the flexibility that these technologies can bring to hardware and how silicon photonics will enable us to interconnect these resources with less concern about their physical placement, " said Frank Frankovsky, chairman of the Open Compute Foundation and vice president of hardware design at supply chain at Facebook.
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