Almost a year ago IBM put $3 billion into research on developing and enhancing their existing photonics technology and putting it onto chips.  The Register has heard of their recent success in creating an integrated silicon photonics transceiver chip with multiplexed wavelengths, allowing multiple signals to be sent simultaneously without interference allowing the incredibly high bandwidth.  The example given to demonstrate what 100Gbps means is downloading an HD movie in 2 seconds, not too shabby at all.  The demonstration model exists, a big first step in photonic technology but we won't see it mass produced for a while yet.  This is a good first step in finally getting rid of copper and moving on to a new medium for data transfer.

"IBM last month claimed a breakthrough in photonics – the practice of using light pulses rather than electrons to quickly send signals in chips."

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