PCB technology makes computers faster

Professor Park Hyo-Hoon at South Korea's Information and Communications University in Daejeon and Professor Lee Yong-Tak, of Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology are using fibre optic wires together with traditional copper wires on Printed Circuit Boards. This is to keep up the data transmission speed within the computer circuits. Until now the high processor speeds have not been taken advantage of sufficiently because of the limited data transmission speed in the traditional copper wires. The new technology with the fibre optical solution can dramatically improve those features. 'We have made a technical breakthrough in having optical fibre wires and copper wires embedded on PCBs and having all the circuits interconnected,' Lee told Agence France-Presse. The inventors of the new technology expects the boards with the fibre optics to be commercial by 2010 when the production costs have been reduced.