Stefan Mileschin

Faster than USB or Thunderbolt

Boffins have emerged from their smoke-filled labs with a cabling system that could provide data transfer speeds multiple times faster than existing USB connections using an extremely thin polymer cable.

The system is similar to Thunderbolt and was shown off at the February IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference.

The boffins have been working on replacing copper wiring with something a little sexier.

MIT alumni and lead author Jack Holloway said that copper is typically used for wires like USB and HDMI to handle data transfers, but it requires a lot of power to work for high data transmission levels.

There's a fundamental trade off between the amount of energy burned and the rate of information exchange, and while you could replace it with fibre optic cables, that introduces other issues. Silicon chips don't play nice with photons, making the interconnection between the cable and the computers more challenging to optimise.

A plastic polymer creates the best of both worlds. This makes it cheaper to manufacture than copper wires, which could be an attractive proposition for cable producers.

https://fudzilla.com/news/52493-boff...er-connections