IBM will present a chipset capable of transferring data 8 times faster than today’s optical circuits during the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference. Thanks to the new circuit it will be possible achieve speeds up to 160Gbps. The new chipset can be integrated on to regular printed circuit boards and thus make it possible for regular home electronics to communicate at these speeds, even if we most likely will see a more industrial usage at first. IBM is able to do this by building an optical transceiver with driver and receiver in today’s simple CMOS technology and then connect it to the optical components, which unfortunately are not as simple to make.
For example, it would take approximately 1 second to download a HD movie, instead of 30 minutes. That is if the harddrive is capable of accepting the ten or so needed gigabytes of data in just one second.
