IBM is pushing towards a world where you can download files faster than your hard drive can write them. At the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference, IBM will unveil a prototype optical transceiver chipset expected to reach speeds at least eight times faster than any optical component available today.

Widespread adoption of this chipset through proper optical cables would do wonders for the Internet. According to IBM, this transceiver could reduce download times for a full length high definition movie to from 30 minutes to around 1 second.

Given the ability to transfer data at 20 Gigabytes per second, one could fill their new computer’s hard drive in roughly 12 seconds; which is  the equivalent speed of downloading 4 million telephone conversations simultaneously.

“The explosion in the amount of data being transferred, when downloading movies, TV shows, music or photos, is creating demand for greater bandwidth and higher speeds in connectivity,” said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science & Technology, IBM Research. “Greater use of optical communications is needed to address this issue. We believe our optical transceiver technology may provide the answer.”

IBM is allowing for widespread use of their optical transceiver chipset by shrinking and integrating many components into one package, and using standard low cost, high-volume manufacturing methods.

The chip’s super-small design, measuring in at only 1/15 the area of a dime, provides a large number of communications channels with extremely quick speeds per channel, and offers the highest amount of data transfer per unit area of chip space in the industry.

The resulting amount of information that can be transferred will offer huge advancements in communications, computing, and entertainment; the Internet, as we know it, is certain to change.

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Entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 4:13 am under Internet.

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