Waguih Ishak, VP and director of the Corning West Technology Center in Palo Alto, California, said at the SPIE Photonics West event last week that the company’s new flexible optical cables - launched at the recent Consumer Electronics Show and set for a commercial roll-out in the current quarter - will revolutionize how glass fibers function with consumer devices.

They are poised to replace conventional cables over shorter distances, from 12 feet (3.5 meters) up to 330 feet (100 meters), in applications where high-speed connectivity is a priority.

Plugs on the ends of the new connectors convert a digital signal into laser emission, and the robust cable can be bent or tangled without causing undue harm. “You can pinch them, knot them, roll your chair over them,” Ishak said.

He added that by using the fastest protocols now available, the cables can transfer video and data at 5 Gb/s for the USB 3.0 compatible version, or 10 Gb/s for the "Thunderbolt" version of the technology pioneered by Intel. The faster of those two speeds allows transfer of an entire high-definition movie in less than 30 seconds.

“It would let you live edit raw video from across a football field,” Ishak said, “and when you need to travel, you coil your cables and put them in your bag without worrying about them taking up lots of room or being heavy.”

To read more: http://optics.org/news/4/2/8