Fujitsu and its partners today announced that they have jointly developed the world’s most energy-efficient silicon photonics optical transceiver circuit for high-speed data transmissions between CPUs in servers and supercomputers, requiring only 5 mW of electricity per 1 Gbps of transmission speed. Optical devices have needed a certain amount of voltage in order to run at high speeds, making it difficult to reduce the power needed for optical transceiver circuits.
Now Fujitsu and its partners have developed a technology that allows optical devices to be run at a low voltage by significantly increasing amplitude when there is a change in the data being transmitted, resulting in high-speed operations of 25 Gbps at half the power previously required. While reducing the amount of power consumed, this technology enables multiple optical transceiver circuits to run in parallel for high-speed, terabit-class transmissions, and is therefore expected to raise the performance of servers and supercomputers.
