USB 3.0 and PCI Express 3.0 Announcements at IDF

Only a year ago at IDF-2009, Intel introduced consumer optical interconnect called LightPeak, offering 10Gbps bandwidth over a multimode fiber capable of reaching 100 meters and the potential to scale to 100 Gps. An enormous amount of press coverage, blogs, YouTube videos, and wild market forecasts followed, and numerous large and startup companies announced support for various components.

Much speculation followed of LightPeak being the next low-cost interconnect for HDTVs and PCs and perhaps with the potential very high unit volumes and low costs the technology could roll into the datacenter at one-tenth the price of current transceiver solutions and disrupt the transceiver industry. While LightCounting anticipated a big announcement, what we found at IDF-2010 this year was a significantly downplayed story. Although LightPeak is not silicon photonics based, Intel’s silicon photonics group had several demonstrations and engineers in white coats showing prototypes of a 50Gbps silicon photonics interconnects running four lanes at 12.5 Gbps over multimode fiber. When asked when the prototype would be a viable product, the answer was “about 4-5 years out.”

July 29, 2011

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