#OPTICAL: "Optical Fibers Boost Speed, Cut Weight and Power of Computers"

A switch to optical fibers for communications is under way that will boost the speed while cutting the power and weight of computers. Using the already popular complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process, IBM's new CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics (CISN) process uses optical waveguides instead of copper wires for all interconnection and communications. Look for migration from copper wire to optical cables across the board over the rest of the decade. R. Colin Johnson, Kyoto Prize Fellow @NextGenLog


IBM's CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics technology includes all the optical components needed to convert electricity to light and back again, including modulators, wave division multiplexers (WDM) and detectors (Source: IBM).

Here is what my Smarter Technology story says about optical: Optical fibers today are used for high-speed shared connections, such as an Internet service provider's connection to the regional backbone. However, IBM's new CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics (CISN) process seeks to migrate optical communications to connections between servers, between the printed circuit boards (PCBs) inside servers, between the semiconductor microchips mounted on PCBs, and eventually between the cores on a single microchip...
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