Justin Rattner, Intel CTO  and director of Intel Labs (right) demonstrated a 50Gbps Silicon Photonics link at the Integrated Photonics Research conference, Monterey, California.

The link, a "concept vehicle" allows Intel researchers to test new ideas and continue the company's quest to develop technologies that transmit data over optical fibers, using light beams from low cost and easy to make silicon, instead of costly and hard to make devices using exotic materials like gallium arsenide (GaAs).

While telecommunications and other applications already use lasers to transmit information, current technologies are too expensive and bulky to be used for PC applications.

"This achievement of the world's first 50Gbps silicon photonics link with integrated hybrid silicon lasers marks a significant achievement in our long term vision of ‘siliconizing' photonics and bringing high bandwidth, low cost optical communications in and around future PCs, servers, and consumer devices" Rattner said.

Dr. Mario Paniccia, Intel Fellow & director of Photonics Research at Intel Labs, holds the thin optical fiber used to carry data from one end of the 50G Silicon Photonics Link to the other.

The 50Gbps prototype is the result of a multi-year silicon photonics research agenda, composed of a silicon transmitter and a receiver chip, each integrating all the necessary building blocks from the first hybrid silicon laser co-developed with UCSB in 2006 as well as high-speed optical modulators and photodetectors of 2007.

The transmitter chip is composed of four such lasers, whose light beams each travel into an optical modulator that encodes data onto them at 12.5Gbps. The four beams then combine and output to a single optical fibre for a total data rate of 50Gbps.

At the other end of the link, the receiver chip separates the four optical beams and directs them into photo detectors, converting data back into electrical signals.

Both chips are assembled using low-cost manufacturing techniques familiar to the semiconductor industry. Intel researchers are already working to increase the data rate by scaling the modulator speed as well as increase the number of lasers per chip, providing a path to future terabit/s optical links – rates fast enough to transfer a copy of the entire contents of a typical laptop in one second.

The research is separate from Intel's Light Peak technology, though both are components of Intel's overall I/O strategy. Light Peak is an effort to bring a multi-protocol 10Gbps optical connection to Intel client platforms for nearer-term applications.

Silicon Photonics research aims to use silicon integration to bring dramatic cost reductions, reach tera-scale data rates, and bring optical communications to an even broader set of high-volume applications.

Silicon photonics will have applications across the computing industry. For example, at these data rates one could imagine a wall-sized 3D display for home entertainment and videoconferencing with a resolution so high that actors or family members appear to be in the room.

Datacenters or supercomputers may see components spread througha building or even an entire campus, communicating with each other at high speed, as opposed to being confined by heavy copper cables with limited capacity and reach.

This will allow datacenter users, search engine companies, cloud computing provider or financial datacenters, to increase performance, capabilities and save significant costs in space and energy, or help scientists build more powerful supercomputers to solve the world's biggest problems.