A team of researchers at IBM announced a groundbreaking new development in microchips. Dubbed the “optochip,” this new creation can transfer 1 terabit of information in one second. To put this into perspective, that’s the equivalent of 500 high definition movies being transferred in just 60 seconds.
This is a huge development in information technology and has the power to completely revolutionize the industry. Social networking sites, video sharing sites and other services that rely on being able to transfer massive amounts of data in a small period of time can all benefit from this new creation.
Unlike previous types of chips that rely on traditional means of transferring data, the Optochip uses optical transmission. The future of this type of technology is very bright and it is conceivable that within the next few years, the Optochip could be improved to be even faster, as difficult as that may be to believe right now.
“Reaching the one trillion bit per second mark with the Holey Optochip marks IBM’s latest milestone to develop chip-scale transceivers that can handle the volume of traffic in the era of big data,” commented Clint Schow, an IBM researcher involved in the creation of the prototype. “We have been actively pursuing higher levels of integration, power efficiency and performance for all the optical components through packaging and circuit innovations. We aim to improve on the technology for commercialization in the next decade with the collaboration of manufacturing partners.”
The team plans to present their findings and discuss more about their prototype during the Optical Fiber Communication Conference held in Los Angeles.