IBM announced another significant advancement with is CMOS integrated nano-photonics technology. The company said its researchers for the first time have tested a fully integrated wavelength multiplexed silicon photonics chip, which will soon enable manufacturing of 100 Gbps optical transceivers. The design implements multiple optical components side-by-side with electrical circuits on a single silicon chip using sub-100nm CMOS technology.
“Making silicon photonics technology ready for widespread commercial use will help the semiconductor industry keep pace with ever-growing demands in computing power driven by Big Data and cloud services,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director of IBM Research. “Just as fiber optics revolutionized the telecommunications industry by speeding up the flow of data — bringing enormous benefits to consumers — we’re excited about the potential of replacing electric signals with pulses of light. This technology is designed to make future computing systems faster and more energy efficient, while enabling customers to capture insights from Big Data in real time.”
IBM’s new 100G transceiver has a range of up to 2 kilometers and uses four laser at different wavelenghts, each operating as an independent 25 Gbps optical channel. Within a full transceiver design, these four channels can be wavelength multiplexed on-chip to provide 100 Gbps aggregate bandwidth over a duplex single-mode fiber, thus minimizing the cost of the installed fiber plant within the data center.
