LUXTERA CAME OUT with possibly the most useful widget at IDF, a really long Displayport cable. How long? Is 10KM long enough for your needs?

Luxtera silicon

Luxtera makes CMOS optical detectors, and also a part that you can attach a laser to to send the signal. They do not however make lasers. The idea is to make a pair of parts that will allow you to send up to 40Gbps over a fiber without any real brainpower, plug and play.

The items they were showing off were a 10Gbps Ethernet cable and a Displayport cable, both over fiber. The neat part was both ends plugged into copper connections, a copper 10GbE connector and a standard Displayport connector.

The Luxtera chips take a standard electrical signal in on one end, converts it to optical, and fires it off over a single mode fiber. On the other end, a second chip converts it back to electrical signals, and then off you go. It is all transparent to the end user, you just plug it in like you would a normal copper cable, but instead of meters, you can run this one for kilometers. If you are really adventurous, you can get to the 10KM range.

Displayport dongle. Connect to 10KM of fiber.

That is the beauty of the Luxtera solution, it is plug and play compatible with copper wiring. For monitor cables, Displayport specs 1.5W of power to the port, more than enough to power the chips. You basically buy a very sophisticated 300+ meter monitor cable.

The ends of the cable are a little bulky, the prototypes here are mainly just for show. Luxtera only sells the chips, so it will be up to cable manufacturers to make them in the size and shape of their choice, so your mileage will vary. In any case, they just blew the whole idea of cable lengths out of the water. µ