Using electrical signals alone to transfer data has become too
slow for the high-speed transfers becoming routine in
datacenters and supercomputers. In datacenters, 10Gbit/s is now
common in high-end servers and routers. Although fiber optics
has replaced copper wires for communications connections outside
the system, the time has come to move those speed advantages
inside to board and chip data interconnects. The search for
materials that can meet the myriad challenges of board-to-board
and chip-to-chip optical interconnects has been ongoing for
several years. A new optical silicone-based material developed
by Dow Corning and IBM promises to overcome most of those
challenges to enable flexible, stable, and easily processable
board-level polymer waveguides. The two companies debuted the
material earlier this month in a presentation at the Photonics
West 2013 conference in San Francisco. A new silicone-based
material developed by Dow Corning and IBM promises to enable
flexible, stable, and easily processable b