A look into Intel's Light Peak technology

Oct. 8, 2009

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Recently, Intel demonstrated its new Light Peak technology to the world. But the fiber-optic communication technology the chip maker is using could be coming to you in 2010 rather than in some distant future.

An optical networking company located in Taiwan, Foci Fiber Optic Communication, is well along the path of selling Light Peak cables and other fiber-optic components.

Janpu Hou, Foci's v.p. of business development says "we plan to have our pilot run ready by the end of next month, and ready to be in mass production in February of next year."

By the way, Foci isn't some no-name manufacturer of commodity hardware. The company supplied the optical networking components used in the Light Peak demonstrations at the Intel Developer Forum last month.

If Intel succeeds in spreading the technology widely, and there's no reason that it might fail, it could replace a profusion of incompatible connectors: Universal Serial Bus, FireWire, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort and even Ethernet. Intel has confirmed yesterday it is trying to standardize Light Peak through USB Implementers Forum.

A time frame for next year actually isn't a total surprise... Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said various components for Intel's Light Peak technology would be ready in 2010, even if he didn't promise any delivery of Intel's chip or computers using Light Peak.

However, there's the tricky part when it comes to actual timing or delivery. If Light Peak arrives in 2010 but a USB standard takes a year after that, early adopters won't necessarily be guaranteed that the Light Peak technology in their machines will work with any Light Peak-based USB standard of the future.

"Intel is working hard with USB-IF to make this an industry standard," said Intel spokesman Nick Knupffer. "It's going to take a couple years to fully implement this, however."

But Intel also has allies to further its cause. For its part, Sony explicitly endorsed Light Peak, and one Intel Developer Forum Light Peak demonstration used a computer running Apple's Mac OS X.

Apple is a company that exerts strong control over its image, and Intel is a company that chooses its demonstration technology carefully, so there's a good chance that Apple is a strong supporter of Intel's new technology.

Companies making phones, music players, monitors, cameras and other devices no doubt would prefer to support an industry-standard specification of Light Peak rather than its pre-USB implementation.

Even making a special-purpose early Light Peak device--say, a docking station or hub that provided ports for video, USB and Ethernet and linked to a laptop via Light Peak--would be an expensive undertaking to say the least.

There are now some industry analysts that are saying, Intel being the large innovation company that it is, that most large electronics products manufacturers would most probably embrace Intel's new Light Peak technology at the blink of an eye.

It will be interesting to see the speed at which major electronics manufacturers adopt Intel's new technology and how it will be distributed in their own products.

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Source: Intel.

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