1.

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.

2. Motivation
Although originally targeted at consumer scenarios of connecting devices and computers, Light
Peak has several characteristics that make it appealing for use as a direct network interconnect, in
a small local area network, as in a data center modular unit:
1. Light Peak supports generic graph topologies for switch interconnections (unlike tree
topologies for other interconnects such as USB or PCI Express).
2. The optical medium is high-bandwidth, offering up to 10Gbps of throughput in each
direction, with cable lengths of up to 100m, and planned upgrades to higher data rates in
future.
3. Packet forwarding at an intermediate switch can be performed entirely in hardware
without interrupting the attached host: forwarding delays are expected to be very small.
4. The ability to flexibly allocate link bandwidth can be used to implement performance
isolation across multiple host interactions.

3. TODAYS CHALLENGES
In the coming future, people would be using more and more electrical devices such as HD
devices, user experience would depend on the huge volume of data capturing, transfer, storage,
and reconstruction. But existing electrical cable technology is approaching the practical limit for
higher bandwidth and longer distance, due to the signal degradation caused by electro-magnetic
interference (EMI) and signal integrity issues. Higher bandwidth can be achieved by sending the
signals down with more wires. Optical communications do not create EMI by using photonics
rather than electrons, thus allowing higher bandwidth and longer distances. Besides, optical
technology also allows for small form factors and longer, thinner cables. The USB connectors on
the smaller devices like mobile phones have to use mini-USB or micro-USB to save on the space
taken up by the wiring and electricity through wire creates electric field interference, but light do
not create EMI since it rely over photonics. Optical connecters can carry extremely narrow
beams of light and fiber can be thinner because more streams can pass through glass or plastic
passages. Each fiber is only 125 microns wide, the width of a human hair. In the present
scenario, the devices are getting smaller, thinner, and lighter but present connecting standards
seems to hinder in their performance being to thicker and stiffer. So vendors turn over to new
technologies providing much better performance and light Peak seems to be a providing a good
solution. Light Peak protocol defines the speed. The protocol is running at 10 gigabits per
second. So, if the native protocols that are running on top of it are also running at 10 gigabits per
second, or something close to that, then the effective bandwidth for a device on the other end
would be equivalent to that 10Gbps.

3.1 Different interconnects

Thus, it can be said that presently we demand for the devices and technologies that provides
much higher bandwidth , more flexible designs, thinner form factor and new and better usage
models and much simpler and easier in terms of connectivitys. Ultimately the main aim is to
build an efficient and balanced system. Thus Light Peak seems to be providing a good solution to
the problems existing with the copper connectors and provides a good platform for the high
performance system.

4. DATA TRANSFER SPEED COMPARISION

How does Light Peak compare to the latest technologies? The slowest is wireless. HDMI version
1.3 and higher will transfer at 10.2 Gbps, while Display Port can go up to 10.8 Gbps. These are
slightly better than Light Peak, but they are mostly designed for video. No one is pushing the
data transfer rates of these protocols.

4.1 The chart shows how Light Peak compares to all of these other protocols.

1. Wireless Network: How does Light Peak compare to the latest technologies? The slowest
is wireless. For example, Wireless N (802.11n) can reach 160 Mb/s in the real world.
Light Peak is about 60 times faster. Faster wireless standards will come out, but nothing
even close to what a good cable can provide.
2. Ethernet: Moving on to other Ethernet type connections, Apple first used Gigabit
Ethernet on the "Mystic" Power Mac G4 in 2000. It gives a full 1 GB/s. The fastest
Ethernet on the market is 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GBase-T), and 100 Gigabit Ethernet is
under development. You won't find 10G Ethernet on many computers. The standard also
makes use of fiber optic cable to achieve these transfer rates.
3. USB 3.0: The latest USB 3.0 connectors are starting to make an appearance. We see that
at best it will be only half the speed of Light Peak. USB 3.0 is rated at 4.8 Gb/s. Of
course, theoretical and actual are two different things. In the past USB was unable to
deliver more than about two-thirds of theoretical speed.

4. Hard Drives SATA 6 Gb/s: Hard drives need to be speedy, and a new SATA protocol
was recently released, SATA 6 Gb/s. As the name implies, it can go 6 Gb/s. The nice
thing with this protocol is it remains compatible with older systems and hard drives. You
do need to have the right motherboard to take advantage of the latest speed increase.
5. Light Peak Covers All the Bases: The chart shows how Light Peak compares to all of
these other protocols. At 10 Gb/s, it can cover a whole range of transfer protocols. The
magic of Light Peaks is that it can become the cable of choice for all these protocols with
no significant loss in transfer speed. The folks at Intel are not finished with Light Peak.
They plan to push the specification up to 100 Gb/s, with some stops along the way. There
is plenty of room for growth - and hopefully backward compatibility - as this latest
specification tries to find its way in the world of technology.

5. LIGHT PEAK V/S USB 3.0

USB 3.0

LIGHT PEAK

It is an electrical cable technology

which transmits data using electricity
which put limitation on speed and
length.

It is an optical cable technology

which relies over light to transmit
data thus providing much better
speed and length.

It consists of 9 copper wires for

transfer of data between the PC and
the peripherals.

It consists of 4 optical fibers for both

upstream and downstream traffic
simultaneously.

Theoretically
it
can
provide
maximum speed of 5Gbps which on
practical grounds get restricted to
about 3Gbps.

Initial proposed speed for Light Peak

(LPK) starts at 10Gbps and has
future potential to scale up to
100Gbps.).

It supports only USB protocol.

The maximum allowable cable

length for USB 3.0 is only about nine
meters.

It is a
supporting
protocols.

The maximum allowable cable

length is about 100 meters and can
be even extended more.

Universal
multiple

connector
existing

6. COMPONENT OVERVIEW
Light Peak consists of a controller chip and an optical module that would be included in
platforms supporting this technology. The optical module performs the conversion from
electricity to light and vice versa, using miniature lasers (VCSELs) and photo detectors. Intel
is planning to supply the controller chip, and is working with other component manufacturers
to deliver all the Light Peak components.
The main components are:
1. Fiber optics cable
2. Optical module
3. Controller chip

6.1 Prototype view of components of light peak controller

6.1 Fiber Optics Cable
The fiber used here is a silica-based optical fiber structure which consists of a cladding layer
with a lower refractive index than the fiber core it surrounds. This refractive index difference
causes a total internal reflection, which guides the propagating light through the fiber core
with an attenuation less than 20 dB/km necessary threshold to make fiber optics a viable
transmission technology. The fiber is coated with a thin primary coating to protect the inner
glass fiber from Environmental hazards.
The internal diameter of each Light Peak fiber is 62.5 microns (around half the size of a
human hair, but thicker than the fiber used in telecoms). Light Peak fiber has a 3-micron
coating to prevent cracking, it can be bent to a radius of 3mm and it won't break. It is mixed
with copper wires for power and fiber optic cables for data.

6.2 Light peak optical cable

6.2 Optical Module

The optical module does the function of converting optical signals into electrical signals and
vice versa. This module contains an array of VCSEL (vertical cavity surface emitting laser).

6.3 Schematic diagram of Optical module

This consists of:
1. VCSEL (light source)
2. Optical modulator
3. PIN diode (light detector)
i)
VCSEL
VCSELs are semiconductor lasers, more specifically laser diodes with a monolithic laser
resonator, where the emitted light leaves the device in a direction perpendicular to the chip
surface. The laser resonator consists of two distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) mirrors parallel
to the wafer surface with an active region consisting of one or more quantum wells for the
laser light generation in between. The planar DBR-mirrors consist of layers with alternating
high and low refractive indices. Light Peak Technology VCSELs have low threshold current
value, low temperature sensitivity, high transmission speed, high fiber coupling efficiency
and circular and low divergence output beam as compared to edge emitters.
ii)
Optical modulator
In optical networks, binary digital modulation is typically used, namely on (light on) and off
(no light) to transmit data. These semiconductor laser devices generate output light intensity
which is proportional to the current applied to them, therefore making them suitable for
modulation to transmit data. Modulation schemes can be divided into two main categories: a
direct and an external modulation. In a direct modulation scheme, modulation of the input
current to the semiconductor laser directly modulates its output optical signal since the output
optical power is proportional to the drive current. In an external modulation scheme, the
semiconductor laser is operating in a Continuous- Wave (CW) mode at a fixed operating
point. An electrical drive signal is applied to an optical modulator, which is external to the
laser. Consequently, the applied drive signal modulates the laser output light on and off
without affecting the laser operation.
iii)
Light Detectors
Light detectors convert an optical signal to an electrical signal. The most common light
detector is a photodiode. It operates on the principle of the p-n junction. There are two main
categories of photo detectors: a p-i-n (positive, intrinsic, negative) photodiode and an

Avalanche Photodiode (APD), which are typically made of InGaAs or germanium. The key
parameters for photodiodes are (a) capacitance, (b) response time, (c) linearity, (d) noise, and
(e) responsivity. The theoretical responsivity is 1.05 A/W at a wavelength of 1310 nm.
Commercial photodiodes have responsivity around 0.8 to 0.9 A/W at the same wavelength.
The dark photo-current is a small current that flows through the photo-detector even though
no light is present because of the intrinsic resistance of the photo-detector and the applied
reverse voltage.
6.3 Controller Chip
The heart of Light Peak is an Intel-designed controller chip that handles the protocols, along
with an optical module that converts electrical signals to photons and vice versa. Basic
implementation unit of Light Peak Controller contains, firstly a Cross bar switching unit
which switches the various protocols from LPK to their respective protocol adapter. Secondly
LPK Ports and Protocol Adapter ports which connect down to PC using any standard and
diverging it their respective protocol through protocol adapter. The Host controller is
typically multi protocol and has multiple ports with a software interface unit and is optimized
for host side implementation whereas the peripheral controller could be single port and single
protocol-based and is optimized for particular usage. This is because of this controller chip
that different protocols get identified and transmitted correctly. API (Application
programming interface) helps to determine the different protocols. It places the FIS (Flag
Identification Symbol) packets in the memory, the controller access these packets from the
memory and send these packets to the destination over the optical link.

6.4 Light peak controller schematic

7. ADVANTAGES
1. The light peak optical modules are physically much smaller than those of telecom
grade.
2. The optical modules are designed to be much lower cost and higher performance.
3. Light Peak can send and receive data at 10 billion bits per second.
4. The thin optical fiber will enable Light Peak to transfer data over very thin, flexible
cables.
5. Unlike electrical cables, Light Peak do not faces the problem of EMI, thus can be
used up to 100m.
6. Light Peak also has the ability to run multiple protocols simultaneously over a single
cable, enabling the technology to connect devices such as docking stations, displays,
disk drives, and more.
7. The data transfer is bidirectional in nature thus enabling devices to transfer
simultaneously.
8. Quality of service implementation.
9. No Operating System (OS) changes required.
10. It also supports another feature known as Hot-swapping which means the PC needs
not be shut down and restarted to attach or remove a peripheral.
11. Economies of scale from a single optical solution.
12. Enables I/O performance for the next generation.
13. Allows for balanced platform, with external I/O keeping up with most platform inter
connects.
14. Up to 100 meters on an optical-only cable. Each fiber is only 125 microns wide, the
width of a human hair.
15. Supports multiple existing I/O protocols over a single cable and smooth transition for
todays existing electrical I/O protocols.
16. Can connect to more devices with the same cable, or to combo devices such as
docking stations.
17. Daisy chain up to 6 devices.

8. Applications
1. Data center
current connect speed : 200 Mb/s
light peak : 10 Gb/s
less expensive and lighter-weight
2. Fast external storage
terabytes of storage
3. Advanced docking
port replicator for plug-in
high-performance docks, display docks, media docks
4. PC-to-PC high-speed connection
high performance LAN connection
transfer of files, PC migration
5. Simplified home connectivity
connect multiple PCs and portable CE devices

9. FUTURE WORK
On the feasibility of leveraging Light Peak technology to construct data center networks.
Some of the important research questions that must be addressed in the future include:
A) Implementation of robust failover and fast rerouting mechanisms
B) Interworking with conventional Ethernet infrastructure in the data center
C) Packaging optimizations and topologies for data center modular units that can reduce
cabling complexity and increase compute density.

10.CONCLUSION
Light Peak is a high-speed, multi-protocol interconnect for innovative and emerging client
usage models, that complements other existing interconnects. Light Peak is the name for a
new high-speed optical cable technology designed to connect electronic devices to each
other. Light Peak delivers high bandwidth starting at 10 GB/s with the potential ability to
scale to 100 GB/s over the next decade. At 10 GB/s, we can transfer a full-length Blue-Ray
movie in less than 30 seconds. Light peak allows for smaller connectors and longer, thinner,
and more flexible cables than currently possible. 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. Intel is working
with the optical component manufacturers to make Light Peak components ready to ship in
this year, and will work with the industry to determine the best way to make this new
technology a standard to accelerate its adoption on a plethora of devices including PCs,
handheld devices, workstations, consumer electronic devices and more. Light Peak is
complementary to existing I/O technologies, as it enables them to run together on a single
cable at higher speeds. At the present time, Intel has conducted three successful public
demonstrations of the Light Peak technology and confirmed that the first Light Peak-enabled
PCs should begin shipping soon. The goal of this new developing technology is to build a
high-bandwidth, fault-resilient, low-cost network that can deliver performance isolation
across applications. It is cheaper as it incorporates cheaper switching component, provide
better bandwidth allocation and performance isolation, uses flexible topologies, integrate
multiple protocol devices on to one cable.

REFERENCES
[1] Sreenivas Addagatla, Mark Shaw, Suyash Sinha and Prashant Chandra, Ameya
S.Varde, Michael Grinkrug , Direct Network Prototype Leveraging Light Peak
Technology , 18th IEEE Symposium on High Performance Interconnects,2010
[2] Jason Ziller and Victor Krutul , A New Optical Technology-Light Peak Intel
Technology Journal, Volume 8
[3] Wooten, E. L., A Review of Lithium Niobate Modulators for Fiber-Optic
Communications Systems
[4] http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light _Peak High speed network
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Peak
[6] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3- 20025559-64.html
[7] http://www.lightpeakinfo.com
[8] http://www.technewsworld.com/story/68231.html
[9] http://optics.or g/in-depth/1/3/6
[10]http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/appleoptical-

inspiration-behind-

light-peak-

[11] http://www.lightwaveonline.com/about-us/lightwave-current-issue/Intel-plots-Light
[12] http://Peak- interconnect-revolution.html
[13] S. Addagatla, M. Shaw, S. Sinha et.al., Direct network prototype leveraging LPT.
[14] Intel Corporation, http://www.intel.com/go/lightpeak/index.html LPT,