IBM's new 'Holey' optical transceiver may be full of holes but is rather quick

I used to sell this sort of stuff in the mid-80s... suffice to say we are getting faster and better all the time at transferring data quickly and in quantity within a chipset. The road blocks may come about when the data tries to leave the boundaries of the chipset, of course... 

IBM unveils one trillion bit-per-second optical chip

Last Thursday at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles, a team from IBM presented research on their wonderfully-named "Holey Optochip." The prototype chipset is the first parallel optical transceiver that is able to transfer one trillion bits (or one terabit) of information per second. To put that in perspective, IBM states that 500 high-def movies could be downloaded in one second at that speed, while the entire U.S. Library of Congress web archive could be downloaded in an hour.