News Article
IQE VCSELs enable IBM to achieve 64 Gb/s
The new III-V based devices will enable data transmission for supercomputers high capacity servers and data centres
IQE's vertical cavity surface emitting laser epiwafer technology has been employed to develop high-performance optical links as reported by IBM and Chalmers University of Technology.
This was announced at the Optical Fibre Communications Conference (OFC) which is taking place this week in San Francisco.
As the data transmission rates across optical interconnects continue to increase, from today’s 25 - 28 Gb/s to next generation interconnects with speeds in excess of 50 Gb/s, there is a need for step-change performance improvements in the optoelectronics and electronics hardware that support this technology.
Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) provide the primary light source for optical interconnects and are now in production for high capacity interconnect cables in data centres and high performance computing systems.
Recent work by IBM and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden used IQE’s VCSEL wafers to achieve a 'record' speed of 64 Gb/s. Data was transmitted over 57m of multimode optical fibre.
The VCSEL epitaxial wafer material was provided by IQE’s Photonics division in Cardiff. The VCSEL device was developed and fabricated at Chalmers and the full interconnect, including drive and receive circuitry, was produced, assembled and tested at IBM.
The interconnect performance reveals the full potential of the advanced VCSEL devices enabled by the high quality of the epitaxial material provided by IQE.
The full results will be presented today at the Optical Fibre Communication conference (OFC) in San Francisco (paper Th3C.2).
