IBM's 'Holey Optochip' Is The Superchip With One Terabit Per Second Speed!

IBM Research team has achieved yet another breakthrough. They have brought about a prototype of an optical chipset named Holey Optochip. It is the first parallel optical transceiver capable of  transferring one terabit (one trillion bits) of information per second. This is roughly equivalent to downloading 500 HD Movies. Voila!

Holey Optochip's information transfer speed is about eight times faster than the currently available parallel optical components. This technology could open new vistas in the possibilites of the way we communicate. This latest milestong of sending data at the speed of one terabit per second provides unprecedented amounts of bandwidth. All this is possible because of the parallel optics that support high-data, short-reach ( less than 150 meters) multimode fiber systems.


Photomicrograph of the back of the IBM Holey Optochip with lasers and photodectors visible through substrate holes.

The Holey Optochip is a 90-nanometer IBM CMOS transceiver IC that has 24 receiver and 24 transmitter circuits after the fabrication of 48 optical vias or silicon holes as you can see from the picture above, one for each transmitter and receiver channel.  This transceiver chip is of the size 5.2 mm x 5.8 mm. . Twenty-four channel, industry-standard 850-nm VCSEL (vertical cavity surface emitting laser) and photodiode arrays are directly flip-chip soldered to the Optochip.

Out and out, this can be termed as the superchip owing to the hundreds of applications it will have once it is out in the market. What do guys think?

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