Big Blue boffins manage 160Gb/s downloads

Blue uses light pulses instead of electrons to shift the data and the boffins believe it could be in the shops by 2010.

It is hoped that such technology will help prevent the Internet 'tubes' getting blocked as demand for broadband services swells.

TC Chen, vice president for science and technology at IBM Research said that the new chipset uses an optical transceiver with standard CMOS technology. It combines this with optical components made from indium phosphide and gallium arsenide. It is small enough at 3.25mm by 5.25mm to be integrated onto a printed circuit board.

It will take three years until suppliers can produce enough parts for IBM to bring optical transceivers into its product stream IBM says.

When it does, a PC using it will be able to reduce the download time of a typical high-definition feature-length movie from 30 minutes to one second. µ