IBM’s silicon photonics technology ready to speed up Big Data applications

IBM engineers have designed and tested a fully integrated wavelength multiplexed silicon photonics chip, which will soon allow manufacturing of 100Gb/s optical transceivers.

This will allow datacentres to offer greater data rates and bandwidth for cloud computing and Big Data applications.

“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,” senior vice president and director of IBM Research Arvind Krishna said in a statement.

“Just as fibre optics revolutionised 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.”  

Silicon photonics uses tiny optical components to send light pulses to transfer large volumes of data at very high speed between computer chips in servers, large datacentres and supercomputers, overcoming the limitations of congested data traffic and high-cost traditional interconnects.