IBM's latest breakthrough technology is an optical hybrid chip, which will be showcased later today at the IEEE conference in San Francisco.
The breakthough technology contained in the chip has been dubbed by IBM as 'silicon nanophotonics' with the 90nm chip combining optical and electrical circuits for blisteringly fast communication speeds of 25Gbps per channel.
IBM anticipates this will allow data centres and Internet server farms to migrate to literally lightning fast optical connections which up until now have been prohibitively expensive due to the costly equipment required to convert between optical and electrical signals.
According to IBM this is the first time nanophotonics has been incorporated on a sub-100nm die.
IBM's full press release is available here with the BBC also discussing this story further here.
