We want more information and we want it now, so technologists are racing to keep up. On Thursday, Infinera said it will support 5 terabits of capacity on its latest gear, while a startup just scored $19 million to make data flow faster across chips. From the long haul to microscopic hops, scientists are trying to push data at the speed of light.

The long haul

Streaming Netflix movies, real-time high-definition video conferencing and interactive services such as Turntable.fm are all changing the way we interact with and use the web. We need more capacity, and we need lower latency (i.e. lag time), and the only way to do that is to add more fiber. Verizon is doing its part with fiber to the home and by deploying 100 gigabit per second fiber pipes across the country for long-haul transit, while Google and others are trying to build fiber-to-the home networks in other parts of the country.

At the same time as consumers and businesses guzzle down bandwidth-hungry applications, they’re also tuning into the Internet from more devices. Providers such as Comcast have seen the broadband usage rise inside homes as tablets and mobile phones tap into the Wi-Fi networks more often. If we ever get to a point where we are streaming all of our content or keeping all of our data online in the cloud, then we’re going to have to bolster the networks feeding the last mile to the home.

Bringing those massive pipes into the terabit age is behind Infinera’s new product, gear that can deliver 10 channels of 500 gigabit per second capacity, or enough to download every single movie that’s on Netflix in 5 seconds. It’s also enough to provide 100 Mbps broadband to every household in Los Angeles, so you can see that as fiber to the home deployments become more common, this will become necessary.

The itsy bitsy hops

Infinera’s gear pushes wavelengths across continents and under oceans, but bandwidth bottlenecks don’t just occur in the broadband pipes, they can occur between the cores and memory on chips. In fact, Infinera’s big breakthrough was that it replaced the electronics on its chips with optics — instead of copper interconnects it uses light — saving time and energy because it didn’t have to convert light back to electricity. That kind of innovation was big for long haul networking, but now it’s becoming more important in all networking as companies try to deliver real-time applications and analysis of data.

The chips those machines run on are getting more powerful through adding more cores, but communicating between those cores on a chip or between chips inside a server requires its own terabit capacity — and light may once again the best way to provide it. Thursday, Skorpios Technologies raised $19 million from Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Cottonwood Technology Fund and Sun Mountain Capital to commercialize a method for integrating photonics onto a chip using standard chip manufacturing methods.

Skorpios isn’t alone in its quest for on-chip photonics; both Intel, IBM and Hewlett-Packard are researching the topic, as well as scores of scientists inside universities. This is a difficult problem, and it’s unclear how Skorpios contributes to solving it because the company declines to share the details of its technology, but its ability to do so within the existing manufacturing industry set up around making chips is an advantage.

Let there be light

As the Internet expands, and our networking relies more on light to transmit digital information, we’re going to need the same technology inside our computers. Right now, it’s akin to the post office sending mail via today’s vehicles and at some point along the route switching over to horse-drawn carriages. It’s a gap that technologists will close, and the big question is when and what it means for the way we build out infrastructure and applications. Those are questions I can’t wait to see people answer.

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Subsea systems typically have subsea optical amplifiers and submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) located in terrestrial landing stations and connected to the either end of the amplifier chain. With its new DTN system, Infinera has replaced the pre-existing SLTE systems. With bandwidth demand continuing to grow at about 50 percent a year, innovations like these are what’s necessary to keep our digital lives humming.

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The product isn’t available for commercial use yet (and there’s no date set for when it will be), but when it is, customers will be able to upgrade their existing fiber equipment with the Ciena kit to 100G. Other players, from Infinera to Alcatel-Lucent, are also trying to deliver 100G networks. Those speeds will help the core network handle the anticipated growth of Internet traffic, and lower the per-bit cost of delivering that traffic. In the video below, Dimple Amin, vice president of R&D and special projects at Ciena, talks about the demonstration, what it does and how far such traffic can travel. He also says there’s no technical reason why these speeds couldn’t be delivered at the edge of  the network to consumers’ homes. That would be the day.

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For those of you who don’t know what the optical transport layer is, it’s the bottom layer plumbing of the Internet. Back in 2000/2001 when Perkins and his colleagues started the company he was optimistic that the Internet would still grow significantly — and of course they were proven right. “Back then, we thought the optical transport layer was about 10 gigabit technology. We’ll need some thing more than 40 gigabit, up to 100 gigabit and higher as the Internet grows.”

What’s driving the growth? Video. “Video traffic is clearly the biggest consumer on the Internet,” and the addition of video traffic swamps all other traffic. “Video will completely swamp the network,” and there will be exponentially increasing bandwidth demand as video applications grow.

This effects the optical network industry because service providers will have to buy more capacity and deliver it faster. Every year, more technology means more workload. But with conventional technology this will break the network and cause huge problems, says Perkins. Infinera is looking to use photon-integrated circuitry to help solve this problem.

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Like many other communications chip companies, Solarflare is working on a way to deliver 10 Gigabit Ethernet over copper, which is cheaper than delivering it via fiber. That enables the high-speed transport technology to move outside of the telecommunications networks, where companies such as Infinera are already pursuing 100 Gigabit Ethernet over fiber, and into mass adoption in the data center. Getting the technology into servers at a reasonable cost would create a market 10 times bigger than that of networking switches.

Others chasing mass adoption of 10 GigE on the server side are Intel and Broadcom, which like Solarflare, have controller chips. Broadcom and Solarflare also have PHY chips sampling with customers. Solarflare CEO Russell Stern plans to integrate the PHY with the controller chip in 2009, beating Broadcom to the market. He will use some of the funding for that purpose.

It’s likely Broadcom will end up attempting an integrated 10 GigE over copper chip as well. Broadcom doesn’t talk about its chips until they’re sampling, but the company did make a mint by cornering the market for integrated 1 Gigabit Ethernet chips for servers. However, success for Solarflare or Broadcom is probably three years out and depends on creating an energy-efficient chip at the 32 nanometer process node, according to Bob Wheeler, an analyst at The Linley Group.

Power consumption is a big challenge for these chips because unless it’s managed properly, they run too hot for servers and switches. And because technology doesn’t stand still in the data center, where virtualization and ever-increasing amounts of data are screaming for fatter pipes, hybrid forms of networking technologies that mix fiber or Fibre Channel with Ethernet are emerging to bridge the Gigabit gap between servers and networking equipment. Broadcom has several products that take advantage of such a hybrid networking environment. Startups such as Arastra and Woven Systems are also in that sector, and may see gains at the expense of a unified 10GigE world, which means Solarflare’s market opportunity could fragment if cheap, integrated 10 GigE takes too long.

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Only, in this instance, the light would provide short-haul transport on a chipset measured in nanometers or millimeters rather than over distances of miles. Lasers could replace the copper connecting multiple processing engines inside a chip, but could also act as interconnects between multiple chips on a board. Light pulses provided by a laser could reduce the bill of materials (if adapted for silicon), power consumption and solve some of the problems associated with following Moore’s Law because it reduces some of the materials needed on a chip. Improved chips mean more computing power and a faster, more dynamic web.

Such efforts are in the early stages with real products likely 10 years out. However, it isn’t so far-fetched. Already Infinera, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company whose products are sold to telecommunications companies, makes an optical chip, but it builds its chips on a far more expensive substrate than a silicon wafer.

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