Will Intel and USB make fiber optics mainstream?
SAN FRANCISCO--You've probably heard about fiber optics for years--some kind of exotic technology used to carry gargantuan quantities of data across continents. But in the not-too-distant future, you might be plugging these tiny glass strands straight into your computer.
That's if Intel gets its way. At its Intel Developer Forum last week, the chipmaker demonstrated fiber-optic technology called Light Peak for connecting many devices to PCs with fiber optic lines. Intel secured major Light Peak endorsement from Sony and now it's has begun trying to make it into an industry standard.
Intel's Light Peak technology uses lasers and fiber optics to transfer data to and from PCs and other devices.
(Credit: Intel)But bringing optical technology to the masses will require more than Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner taking the stage to connect a thin white Light Peak cable into the back of a prototype PC. According to sources familiar with the situation, the most likely mechanism to carry Light Peak out of the R&D lab to the edge of your laptop will be the venerable Universal Serial Bus, and Intel has begun pounding the pavement to try to make that happen.
"Now all the pieces are in place," Rattner said. "We need to get a standard established to turn on the entire ecosystem to Light Peak."
Even technophobes are familiar with USB. The plug-and-play technology started its journey in PCs and has spread to handsets, consumer electronics devices, digital cameras, and more. And new developments from the group behind the standard, the USB Implementers Forum, could expand adoption more, with a new faster, more power-efficient version and with technology to make it better for charging devices plugged into a computer or power outlet.
The new "SuperSpeed" USB 3.0 has 5 gigabit-per-second data transfer rate, more than 10 times that of the USB 2.0 version that prevails today, and the first USB 3.0 device achieved certification last week. A separate new USB feature increases the amount of power that USB devices can use from 0.5 amps to 0.9 amps while adding another 1.5 amps specifically for charging batteries, making USB for tasks besides just transferring data.
Jeff Ravencraft, the USB-IF's president and chairman
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)The 5Gbps speed is a big step up; NEC's demonstration of its newly certified USB 3.0 controller showed 500MB of data transferred in 4.4 seconds with USB 3.0 compared to 39 seconds with USB 2.0. But for USB to really break out--to accommodate the data transfer needs of a large 3D TV screen, for example, or to synchronize a terabyte-capacity iPod in moments--there's still more work to be done.
Enter fiber optics.
"At some point the industry is going to have to transition," Jeff Ravencraft, the USB-IF's president and chairman, said in an interview, because copper wires such as those in the current USB 2 and new USB 3 standards have limits on how fast they can transmit signals. "I think the next transition is going to be to optics."
Intel's aspirations and allies
Intel's hope for Light Peak is to create a single connection for video, storage devices, the network, printers, Webcams, and anything else that plugs into a PC. Light Peak uses circuitry that can juggle multiple communication protocols at the same time, and the Light Peak promise is for a universal connector to replace today's incompatible sockets for USB, FireWire, DVI, DisplayPort, and HDMI. It's a hot-plug technology, meaning that devices can be linked when they're up and running.
Intel has pre-production chips and said the technology will be ready to ship in 2010. In its current form, Light Peak can transfer data at 10Gbps each direction along the fiber optic line, but Intel said Light Peak will reach much higher speeds--100Gbps in the next decade, according to Jason Ziller, director of Intel's optical input-output program office.
The Sony endorsement is important, because the company sells PCs, music players, cameras, video cameras, and Blu-ray players. But another company at least as significant had a quieter Light Peak appearance at the Intel show: Apple.
Intel's second demonstration of Light Peak, in which a single cable transported high-definition video and data to a storage system at the same time, used a Mac OS X computer. Apple would be a strong ally: it has influential designs with an emphasis on uncluttered appearance and ease of use, it's willing to take a stand for technology it believes is superior, and its iPhones and iPods that take ever longer to synchronize with a PC as storage capacity expands.
Intel sees Light Peak connecting everything inside a computer to everything outside a computer.
(Credit: Intel)And on Saturday, Engadget reported that Apple isn't merely a Light Peak ally, but that it brought the Light Peak idea to Intel and has plans to bring it to Macs next year. Apple and Intel declined to comment on the matter.
But do we really need to go all the way to optical now? High-speed electrical communications is hard--wires can cause electromagnetic interference, for example, and USB 3 cables can only be 3 meters long compared to 5 meters for USB 2. But technology for transferring data over copper wires, like technology for shrinking computer chips, has defied predictions that it will run out of gas.
The short answer is there is a need. Video screens are getting larger, expanding beyond HD TV's 1920x1080 pixels, and 3D video requires a doubled data transfer rate. Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group expects even the newer DisplayPort video standard has only about 24 to 30 months before new technology needs more capacity than it can supply.
"Optical may be the only way to do it," he said, saying the need for 60Gbps transfer rates is on the horizon.
USB group to standardize Light Peak?
Ravencraft wouldn't comment on whether the USB group is working with Intel on adopting Light Peak for the coming transition to optical communications, but there are indications that could happen.
For one thing, the USB 3.0 specification explicitly accommodates optical lines in the cable's connector, a move to try to "future-proof" the standard. For another, when Intel demonstrated Light Peak, it used USB connectors on its prototypes. Ziller said in an interview that nothing should be read into that choice, but it was conspicuous nonetheless.
Intel used USB ports for its demonstrations of its Light Peak technology for hot-pluggable, high-speed fiber optic communications.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Light Peak discussions are under way at the USB group, said Steve Roux, senior director of business development at NEC and a member of the USB Implementers Forum board.
"Through the USB-IF we're looking at it. It's clearly something we'll have to pay attention to," Roux said, adding, "We don't see it as a USB 3.0 killer."
The politics of standardization are another reason the USB-IF makes sense for Light Peak. Along with leading developers such as Intel, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Texas Instruments, ST-Ericsson, and Microsoft, there are more than 200 companies involved in USB development. The USB-IF devotes two whole pages crammed with corporate logos in its presentation to illustrate who widespread USB buy-in is. And to meet Intel's ambition, Light Peak will need to win over the video community as well as those who presently use USB.
There are other groups where standards are set--the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, for example, which oversees the USB competitor FireWire as well as 802.11 for wireless networks and 802.16 for Ethernet networks.
There are billions of USB-enabled devices on the market, and the number is growing. This chart shows In-Stat's forecast for USB 3 devices in red.
(Credit: In-Stat)Doherty believes both are possible. The USB group could get a connector defined rapidly for consumer use, and the IEEE could work on a variation for higher-end systems such as servers, with optical lines linking processors together and linking computers to storage systems.
"If this starts out as a 100-gigabit USB 3F (F for fiber) connector, there's nothing precluding it from going to IEEE and becoming a 10-terabit link with the same connector," Doherty said.
The money question
There's another obstacle besides politics that Intel and any allies must reckon with: cost.
Optical networking, in which lasers send information as photons down transparent fibers, doesn't come cheap.
Doherty believes high-volume production could lower its costs, though. And USB is nothing if not high-volume: about 3 billion USB devices ship a year right now, according to In-Stat.
Jason Ziller, director of Intel's optical input-output program office
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)"There's every indication that if they get down to USB economics, they can get the cost of the connector down to tens of cents instead of the tens of dollars of most high-performance fiber optic connectors now," Doherty said.
One way to cut costs would be to use plastic fibers rather than higher-quality glass, Doherty said. That limits data-transfer capacity compared to glass, but plastic is cheaper and also is more flexible, Doherty said. Here's a sign Intel agrees: Ziller said of Light Peak, "You can tie a knot in it and it'll still work."
Intel has conducted plenty of research into silicon photonics, in which lasers are built into processors themselves, but Light Peak uses more conventional technology for the optical modules that convert ones and zeros into light at and vice versa. Ziller said Intel is using optical modules from mainstream manufacturers such as Avago Technologies, SAE Magnetics, and Foxconn.
Linking two wires is well understood, but how exactly does that work with two fiber optic lines? In Rattner's demonstration featured a hot-plugged Light Peak cable, so evidently Intel has an idea how to make it work economically.
High-end fiber connections are made by fusing the optical lines, but Doherty believes a gel-like adhesive, perhaps protected by a sheath that snaps back when the connector is plugged in, could be used. "It may not be for things you take on and off a hundred times a day," he said, but such a connector could be used dozens or hundreds of times.
Plenty of Intel ideas have flopped, but the company does have more experience than most introducing complicated technology. And it's not putting on the hard sell for Light Peak.
"We're talking hundreds of millions of ports over next the few years, which really will help drive the costs down and make it an attractive technology," Rattner said. "Fundamentally, we believe the time has come for the optical technologies to go high volume."
Correction, 6:03 a.m. PDT: This story was updated to correct a statement about the time needed to transfer 500MB over USB 2.0 in NEC's demonstration. The time was 39 seconds.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
E.g., practically all stereo receivers, DVD players, etc., made in the past few years have S/PDIF (TOSLink) fiber optic connections.
Sony, Dell, Apple, etc., all currently ship TOSLink equipped laptops. Even my old SoundBlaster card had S/PDIF.
McD
" Intel secured major Light Peak endorsement from Sony and now it's has begun trying to make it into an industry standard."
Presumably, one of those times is wrong...
I was beginning to think the pain killers were making me see things.
The subject matter is very interesting and I liked the content. I find with the terabyte drive that I have on USB and the amount of data that I transfer, is it very slow.
"NEC's demonstration of its newly certified USB 3.0 controller showed 500MB of data transferred in 4.4 seconds with USB 3.0 compared to 4.4 seconds with USB 2.0"
"NEC's demonstration of its newly certified USB 3.0 controller showed 500MB of data transferred in 4.4 seconds with USB 3.0 compared to 4.4 seconds with USB 2.0"
This kind of simplification of connections has been extremely overdue.
The only thing i worry about is how the "Average Joe" will handle them.
I've seen people bend and crush cables in all sorts of ways.
Fibre optics + the old ways of handling cables just won't work, especially if it is glass fibre.
Just thought I'd add that. I found it a little amusing.
1.) It allows press and other parties to see what's been done on the inside of the machine.
2.) It allows some bit of anonymity for the hardware manufacturer - they get to show off new capabilities, without committing to when the feature will show up, or in which portions of the product line.
This is standard practice. A few years ago, Intel was introducing a new processor. The demo went well, but the CPU unit was hidden beneath a skirted table. What they didn't make generally known at the time of the demo was that the *demo* version of the new processor ran so hot that it needed a separate, external, liquid-cooled refrigeration device hooked up for the demo. All the extra hardware wasn't needed by the time the chip was in production, but still, the press made some hay with that story.
Another item I noticed, the length of the cable is up to 100m. If there is a bit more power behind that, you could eliminate ethernet all together and have a screaming fast network! Think about realtime 3-D gaming over a network. That would be sweet!
This would be the backbone of some pretty cool technologies for displays, human interfaces, et cetera. Real 'Minority Report' stuff in the next ten years? Maybe!
And the next Ethernet standard (from the P802.3ba working group) is targeting 40 GB/s and 100 GB/s both on copper and fiber. The single-mode fiber version reach *at least* 10 kilometers (!) and one draft version will do 100 GB/s for a full 40km range (100GBASE-ER4). Products based on these draft standards are already being demonstrated.
The real issue here is cost. Even 10GbE is a still a niche product costing hundreds of dollars for a NIC. 100GB products will cost in the thousands of $ to start. Of course even the old 10 mb/s ethernet was this expensive too... prices will come down but for ubiquitous devices like printers and iPods it has to be really cheap.
Which is where USB comes in. The reason USB exists at all was in reaction to Apple's greedy patenting scheme for Firewire. The PC manufacturers didn't want to pay Apple's patent and created USB with Intel (which wanted a CPU-bound interface). Apple "only" demanded a few dollars per port for Firewire (which was already considered outrageous) so you can imagine compared to 10/100 GbE prices, we can understand why a high-speed USB must deliver fast speed at literally a tiny fraction of the cost. Anything above a couple bucks a port will get rejected.
Still, even MOST fiber-optic in the vehicle has it's issues, one of which has been cost (which is largely due to IP licensing and nearly monopolistic conditions for some of the components).
It would be nice to see some of these technologies converge on the same oPhy. Not sure how feasible that is, but at least the POF and termination can be the same, if not interoperable (understanding that different markets/applications have more or less rigorous connector/termination needs).
I think you may have confused a "b" for a "B". Current top Ethernet standard is 10Gbps. That would be *bits* per second rather than the *bytes* per second you cite.
As long as you have addressing and multiplexing, you don't need multiple frequencies. Also, I believe the article mentions the ability to communicate with multiple devices.
It's called SCSI or SAS. Whether you connect the drive internally or externally, you're going to get the same bus speeds.
1) Unless they switch to a plastic transmission media rather than glass, this will never fly in the consumer space. Glass is too fragile, particularly when you coil it too tightly. I know I wouldn't be able to stuff a fibre cable into my backpack's cable pocket without fracturing it.
2) Unless they make screw-on USB connectors, I don't see this being a credible solution for permanent connectivity options such as SAN or IP-based networks. Gotta be able to secure your cables if you don't want to lose connection to your storage.
The other problem has always been how inflexible the cables are. I'm glad to see they are addressing that issue.
I think they should do a little better with how many times a cable can be reused before having to be replaced. Portable devices like laptops or netbooks may have to literally be plugged in hundreds of times. I really can't see anyone wanting to constantly have to replace their cables.
Lastly, I would have thought they would put more effort into improving wireless, making it simpler, faster and more secure. It seems to me the wave of the future will all be wireless. Why are they putting so much effort into something that might not even be used? I suppose it might be good for a flash drive that has no power of its own and must be powered from the port, but other than that by the time they have this ready to roll, I would expect wireless to be much better than it is now.
The kind of data going over this sort of stuff would possibly be very dynamic with some data very small some very large some highly compress some with little compression.
If you could imagine simulating a rats brain,different bits of your active brain data would need to work at different levels . If you applied that same principles to a high speed P2P ,Server Farm based Hybrid computer Game you can see that different aspects of the game would need many different types of data processes. So I can see that the Wires are getting up to scratch for the future but are the software developers or IC developers ready for those types of dynamic bandwidths at a far wider level and for a far greater application/user base. The world could do with a new dynamic scalability Standards board to be honest if they want to keep up with their own potential.
How to you transfer electric power through an INSULATOR?
will it have a copper wire for power?
Anyway, USB 3.0 is explicitly backwards compatible with USB 2.0, just as 2.0 was with 1.0. Think about it. Did you ever have issue with a 2.0 device transferring data to a 1.0 port or vice-versa? Believe me, the USB-IF has done their homework; they are not going to take something as drop-dead simple as USB and complicate it. In fact, they went to great lengths to make even cables/ports backwards-compatible: some of the new ones (for example, the square-ish ones you see on printers and HDD's) are starting to look kind of ugly just so that you can plug in an old cable as well.
- by fiberer September 28, 2009 8:18 PM PDT
- Optical communications industry is developing fast in Asia. As the improvement of quality and technical content, Asia's optical communications industry became More and more be used by European. European companies become shifting their purchase market to Asia market. From 2005 to 2009 the Asian optical communications market has been showing a blowout bargain quantity. China's ZhuJiang Delta region in particular, began to appear a number of high-quality and high-tech factories. Like Fiberer Global Tech Ltd ?www.fiberer.com?factories rapidly developed into Europe and the USA the company's new optical communication suppliers. Gradually replaced the optical communication manufacturer of European and the USA .
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- by play7 September 30, 2009 6:41 PM PDT
- I think your a little confused the USA and Japan don`t/or are not allow ( by a greement ) trade in commication sector is not allowed? They cant do business in china in theis sector.....
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