13-11-2012, 01:13 PM
LIGHT PEAK TECHNOLOGY
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ABSTRACT
Light Peak is Intel's code-name for a new high-speed optical cable technology designed to connect electronic devices to each other in a peripheral bus. Light Peak delivers high bandwidth starting at 10Gb/s with the potential ability to scale to 100Gb/s over the next decade.At 10Gb/s, you could transfer a full-length Blu-Ray movie in less than 30 seconds. It is intended as a single universal replacement for current buses such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, PCI Express and HDMI. In comparison to these buses, Light Peak is much faster, longer ranged, smaller, and more flexible in terms of protocol support. Light Peak also has the ability to run multiple protocols simultaneously over a single cable, enabling the technology to connect devices such as peripherals, displays, disk drives, docking stations, and more. Light peak was developed by Intel and brought to market with technical collaboration from Apple Inc. In late February 2011, Apple introduced its Mac Book Pro laptop computers with light peak technology and announced its commercial name as Thunderbolt. It can be added to existing products with relative ease.
INTRODUCTION
The present era is the era of connectivity. Think of any sort of information, and it can be transferred to us within question of a little time; be it audio information, video information or any other form of data. Now talking about transferring data between our computer and the other peripherals, the first and foremost standard comes to our mind is Universal Serial Bus (USB). It is a medium speed serial data addressable bus system which carry large amount of data to a relatively short distance (up to 5m).The present version USB 3.0 promises to provide theoretical speed of up to 5Gbps. But Intel has unveiled a new interoperable standard called LIGHT PEAK which can transfer data between computers and the peripherals at the speed of 10Gbps in both the directions with maximum range of 100m (much higher than USB or any other standard) and has potential to scale its speed high up to 100Gbps in near future. Light Peak is the code name for a new high-speed optical cable technology designed to connect electronic devices to each other. Light Peak is basically an optical cable interface designed to connect devices in peripheral bus. It is being developed as a single universal replacement for the current buses such as SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire, PCI Express, and HDMI etc in an attempt to reduce the proliferation of ports on computers. Fiber-optic cabling is not new, but Intel executives believe Light Peak will make it cheap enough and small enough to be incorporated into consumer electronics at a price point that consumers and manufacturers will accept. Thus with light peak, the bandwidth would tremendously increase, multiple protocols could be run over single longer and thinner cable. The prototype system featured two motherboard controllers that both supported two bidirectional buses at the same time, wired to four external connectors. Each pair of optical cables from the controllers is led to a connector, where power is added through separate wiring. The physical connector used on the prototype system looks similar to the existing USB or FireWire connectors. Intel has stated that Light Peak has the performance to drive everything from storage to displays to networking, and it can maintain those speeds over 100 meter runs.
College of Engineering Chengannur
LIGHT PEAK TECHNOLOGY
College of Engineering Chengannur
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Optical networking technologies have been over the last two decades reshaping the entire telecom infrastructure networks around the world and as network bandwidth requirements increase, optical communication and networking technologies have been moving from their telecom origin into the enterprise and Light Peak is one of its successful outcome. It is basically a new high-speed optical cable technology designed to connect electronic devices to each other .It also support multiple protocols simultaneously with the bidirectional speed of about 10Gbps (can scale up to about 100Gbps). In comparison to other bus standards like SATA and HDMI, it is much faster, smaller, longer ranged, and more flexible in terms of protocol support. Thus it basically provides a standard low cost high bandwidth optical-based interconnect, it supports multiple existing I/O protocols and smooth transition between them, it supports wide range of devices (handhelds, PCs, workstations etc.) ,connect to many devices with the same cable, or to combo devices, have smaller connectors and longer (up to 100m on single cable), thinner and economical. Light peak consist of a controller chip and optical module that would be included in platform to support this technology. The optical module performs the task of conversion of electricity to light conversion and vice versa, using miniature lasers and photo detectors. This transceiver can send two channels of information over an optical cable, necessary, since pc needs at least two ports. The controller chip provides protocol switching to support multiple protocols over single cable. The Light Peak cable contains a pair of optical fibers that are used for upstream and downstream traffic to provide speed of about 10Gbps in both the directions and power is added through separate wiring. It was developed as a way to reduce proliferation of number of ports on the modern computer. Earlier USB was developed for the same purpose and performed very well in this direction but increased bandwidth demand and high performance has led to development of new more efficient technologies. Combining the high bandwidth of optical fiber with Intel’s practice to multiplex multiple protocols over a single fiber, optical technology may change the landscape of IO system design
College of Engineering Chengannur
Light Peak Technology
in the future. It’s possible that most of the legacy IO protocols can be tunneled by optical capable protocols, so some of the legacy IO interfaces can be converged to one single optical interface, significantly simplifying the form factor design of computers. This change in IO system will definitely affect the design of systems.
There are four main components in this figure, the IO devices, the IO controller which connects to the IO devices through optical fiber, the processing unit and the interconnection between the IO controller and the processing unit, whatever it can be implemented as. Mobile and handheld devices are two fast growing market segments which attract interests from processor vendors. For mobile and handheld devices, user interface and IO are two important factors besides computing power that affect end users purchase decision .Taking power into account, it’s possible that more carefully tuned IO workload offloading engines will be integrated into the IO controller, saving the power to move the data from IO a long way to the system memory. It makes no sense to have a high throughput IO system with insufficient processing power or overloaded interconnections between IO system and the processor. The ultimate goal of system architects is to make a balanced and efficient system, on both power and cost grounds .