Digital optical interfaces

Intel light peak - The article in the San Jose Mercury today about the Intel optical cable technology reminded me about Infinera PIC technology, that I will describe below.
Anyway Intel is marketing an optical interface cable solution for the consumer/PC market to provide multi-gigabit data transfer.  It is unique because the cable connectors include the diodes and driver circuits already attached to the fiber cable.  They are proposing a single light peak port on the computer (they seem to emphasize the space savings of a single small connector on notebooks) that will daisy chain to many peripherals.  The cable takes advantage of a particular fiber technology that allows smaller bending radius without signal loss.  The cable is 4 single mode fibers used as 2 pairs - each pair is one transmit fiber  and one receive fiber (and maybe some copper to provide power).  Maybe in a couple of years this will make sense, but it seems awkward  to me, to daisy chain all your peripheral.  It makes sense maybe for disk drives and networks, but many devices like printers, scanners, and  displays do not have very high data rates or do not need high speed in both directions.  Intel will be making the controller device that goes in the PC and peripherals.  They are partnering for the cable and optical parts.

Infinera - They make a PIC  (photonic integrated circuit).  The technology here is very exotic and cool. 
The goal is to provide a high bandwidth digital network products to telcom  equipment vendors for their 100 Gbps and higher networks.  The technology is using mulitmode fibers that support many modulated frequencies in one fiber.  This has been done with discrete laser drivers and multiplexors made into bulky modules and boards.
The Infinera PIC is a monolithic integrated , non-hybrid   indium phosphide chip that takes 10 electrical inputs, and outputs 10 light frequencies onto one cable fiber.  The chip has 10 diodes of different frequencies along with waveguides and light control logic that combines the 10 waves into one.  They also make a receiver chip that does the reverse.  As you can imagine indium phosphide optical fab is not a commodity technology so they run their own local production.   Infinera also makes a full line of switching, routing, and management hardware and software.  The Infinera website has lots of details on their technology.