Download of 40,000 songs possible in seconds with this tiny device
India Today Online
New Delhi, February 14, 2014 | UPDATED 17:07 IST
The prototype 200-400 Gigabits per second ADC. Photo: IBM Research
This is possible since the device could increase internet speed to 200-400 Gigabits per second (Gb/s) and that too at very low power.
The breakthrough in boosting internet speed has been made at IBM lab, and the announcement came on Thursday.
The tech giant said in a statement that the device can be used to improve Big Data transfer between clouds and data centres four times faster than current technology.
Though the unnamed device is only a lab prototype for now, a previous version of this is licensed to Semtech Corp, a supplier of analog and mixed-signal semiconductors.
The world has changed since 1992. That year, we could only transfer 100 gigabyte of data per day. Today, its two Exabytes per day - jump of 20 million times!
According to the statement, IBM scientists are now developing an ultra-fast and energy efficient analog-to-digital converter (ADC) technology to enable complex digital equalization across long-distance fibre channels.
An ADC converts analog signals to digital, approximating the right combination of zeros and ones to digitally represent the data so it can be stored on computers and analyzed for patterns and predictive outcomes, said the statement.
It cited the example of scientists planning to use hundreds of thousands of ADCs to convert analog radio signals that originate from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to digital.
Click here for more photos of the device: