20. How will advances in Integrated Photonics help Data Centers?

• Datacenters are estimated to consume 3% of the total power generated in the United States. 10-Gb/s Ethernet optical transceivers currently consume only one watt of power compared with 10 Watts for electrical transceivers, they saved data centers an estimated $170M/year. If data centers employed optical transceivers on a more widespread scale, they could achieve far more dramatic energy savings. The path to dramatic energy savings is to use photonic integration and on-chip WDM to scale to 100 Gb/s and higher. In the future, solutions based upon increased photonic integration, especially silicon photonics, will implement 100 Gb/s with less power per bit than current 10-Gb/s solutions. The size, power consumption, and performance of integrated photonics will make integrate their use ideal for data center applications which require transporting data over distances less than a meter to 10 k

Source:

http://manufacturing.gov/ip-imi.html