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On April 22, 1977 General Telephone and Electronics sent the first live telephone traffic through fiber optics at the not-so-blazing speed of six megabits per second. Three decades later, optical communication is widespread. It's estimated that more than 80 percent of all the long-distance voice and data traffic is carried over optical fiber networks. Single fiber data rates are in the tens of gigabits per second.
But fiber bandwidth isn't everything. The bottleneck in optical communications comes when you have to convert the light into electrons. To do this today requires an array of discrete optical components. So while the cost of the optical fiber is cheap -- much cheaper than copper cable -- the cost of optical transceivers is not competitive with all-electronic solutions. The result is that at distances of 10 meters and under, optical communication is much less common than copper solutions. But as bandwidth requirements increase, the preference for optical interconnects over copper-based interconnects also increases, even at short distances.
Currently optical transceivers are built using a combination of expensive technologies. This includes discrete laser and photodetector components built from gallium arsenide or indium phosphide. These are connected to a printed circuit board along with dozens of other components and are interconnected by wires. The number of components that must be manufactured, assembled and tested makes current optical transceivers prohibitively expensive, except for long-haul applications.
Two recent announcements point the way to much less expensive optical solutions based on CMOS technology. Both IBM Research and Luxtera have demonstrated optical transceivers that take advantage of standard semiconductor technology to bring the core of optical communications onto silicon.
IBM researchers have built a prototype of an optical chip package which offers 160 Gbps of bandwidth -- 16 channels providing 10 Gbps each. This is eight times greater bandwidth than today's optical devices. The IBM optical transceiver has the driver and receiver circuits integrated onto a CMOS die. Other optical components, constructed from indium phosphide (InP) and gallium arsenide (GaAs), are added separately to the package, which is 3.25 by 5.25 millimeters in size. The optical transceiver is bump bonded in a flip chip assembly to attach the separate laser and photodiodes. The laser ends up sitting on top of the chip. The whole chipset uses just 2.5 watts of power.
The idea is to get the optics as close to the microprocessor as possible so that chip-to-chip communication can take advantage of the power savings and increased bandwidth offered by optical media.
Although IBM's press release mentions that the technology is capable of downloading a movie in a second, its first use will probably be in the data center. According to Marc Taubenblatt, senior manager for Optical Communications Group at IBM Research, this technology is especially interesting for HPC solutions, where the technology could be used to connect the microprocessor to I/O devices or the cluster interconnect fabric.
This will require printed circuit board manufacturers to add polymer waveguides to their boards and to develop compatible interfaces with IBM's optical circuitry. Mass manufacturing of optical printed circuit boards that incorporates the technology should enable low-cost optical solutions for node-to-node interconnects in a cluster.
"It's something that I think will take a few years for that ecosystem to become available in the market, but it's something we're actively working on," said Taubenblatt.
IBM presented the technology this week at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference & Exposition and the National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference, in Anaheim. The paper was titled "160 Gbit/s, 16-channel full-duplex, single-chip CMOS optical transceiver." What they described at OFC is the first generation of the technology. IBM has already prototyped the next generation in the lab that runs even faster. In this version each channel attains 12.5 Gbps reliably and can be pushed as high as 15 Gbps.
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