Leave it to the lasers! Yup, with NEC and Optical Interconnection Research working together, I believe that we will see some amazing advances with optical connections. Just think of the possibilities!

NEC joined “Optical Interconnection Research for Ultra-Fast Computers” in April, 2005. This research is part of the “Elementary-Technology Research for Future Supercomputers” project, which is being supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. The realization of a high-speed and highly reliable VCSEL has been long sought after in the race to develop next-generation supercomputing systems.

A transmission speed of over 20 Gbps will be required for optical interconnection among LSI chips in supercomputers in 2010. The newly developed VCSEL has great potential in the field of optical interconnection because it can double conventional transmission speeds. In particular, this device is essential to the enhancement of data transmission speeds between CPUs and memories, which is currently the bottleneck hindering the calculation speed of next-generation supercomputing systems. This development is expected to contribute to the rapid progress of the performance of next-generation supercomputing systems. Source: Physorg

Tags: high speed internet, optical interconnection, 20 gbps, lsi chips