Bending Light Better
Clear Curve makes Light Peak Possible.
Intel is working with the optical manufacturers to hopefully ship Light Peak components in 2010. Intel plans to work with the industry to make this new technology a standard. This should accelerate its adoption on a lots of devices like PCs, handheld devices, workstations, consumer electronic devices and more.
Light Peak is complementary to existing I/O technologies, as it enables them to run together on a single cable at higher speeds. Light Peak builds on Intel's commitment to working with the industry on existing standards.
What is ClearCurve?
Optical cables tend to leak light when bent tightly around corners in tight angles. Fiber can be installed with relative ease along existing infrastructure routes in buildings or between buildings like sewers and elevator shafts. In these installations the cable is typically in a form with mechanical armouring on the outside. This armouring makes it less useful when routed into homes, where it would have to be bent around studs and make short-radius right angle turns where walls meet. Corning claims that the average apartment installation would require around twelve 90° (right-angle) bends resulting in the signal being almost entirely lost. For this reason, most fiber to the homes end in a utility room, where it is then converted to copper wiring for further distribution.
The same problems also limited the use of optical cabling in consumer electronics and computers. One of the few consumer uses was TOSLINK, used to move digital audio around stereo components. In this role fiber was chosen for reasons of simplicity (since a digital audio signal, such as produced by a CD player, can drive the TOSLINK red light-emitting diode directly) and the elimination of ground loops, thereby using light signaling to avoid additional conversions and isolation circuitry. For computer use, the relatively large radius curves meant that fibre was only really useful for external buses, and here they found use only in roles where high bandwidth was demanded; Fibre Channel and some supercomputer networking systems are among the few examples.
In July 2007, Corning Incorporated announced a new optical fiber known as ClearCurve that uses nanostructure reflectors to keep light trapped within the fiber even when bent around small-radius curves. Corning's original market for ClearCurve was fiber to the home market, especially in large housing units and apartments where the installation of fiber into the individual units would otherwise be difficult. ClearCurve can be pulled through the same sorts of conduits as the existing copper, but is physically smaller and carries much more bandwidth. Even the single-mode version, with a single carrier frequency, offers maximum data rates of 25 Gbps.
Enter Light Peak
These same advantages are useful in the desktop computing. Older computer cables required armoring and were relatively bulky as a result, ClearCurve does not require anything other than protection from nicks and cuts, and the resulting cables can be much thinner. Instead of traditional computer cable armor, a flexible braided copper shell can be used to provide power to devices while also offering some physical protection. The Light Peak Cables are thinner than the common USB cables used to attach printers or similar devices, about as thin as the reduced-size cabling used to support devices like mice.
The Light Peak cable contains two(2) optical fibers - one is used for upstream and one is used for downstream traffic. This means that Light Peak offers a maximum of 10 Gbps in both directions at the same time.
Intel has stated that Light Peak is protocol independent, allowing it to support existing standards with a change of the physical medium. Few details on issues like protocol or timing contention have been released. Intel says that Light Peak has the performance to drive everything from storage to displays to networking, and it can maintain those speeds over 100 meter runs. As advantages over existing systems, they also note that a system using Light Peak will have fewer and smaller connectors, longer and thinner cables, higher bandwidth, and can run multiple protocols on a single cable. This is cool stuff!
Light Peak Info
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