The researchers sent a cable with a more efficient transmission that can completely replace Thunderbolt and USB.

Researchers are working on a wiring system that can use extremely thin polymer cables to provide data transfer speeds that are several times faster than existing USB connections. The system echoes the design path of Thunderbolt.

The research was published at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February and aims to develop a connection type that provides much better connections than current methods. To a certain extent, its goal is to achieve this goal by replacing copper wires with other things.

Combining the advantages of copper tubes and fiber optic conduits, the researchers used a plastic polymer. This makes it cheaper to manufacture than copper wire, which may be an attractive technology for cable manufacturers. This polymer can also use Asia-Pacific Hertz electromagnetic signals, which is more energy-efficient than copper cables under high data loads. It is believed that this efficiency makes it close to the efficiency of optical fiber systems, but the key is better compatibility with silicon chips.

A low-cost chip is paired with a polymer catheter to generate a strong enough high-frequency signal to be directly transmitted to the catheter. Therefore, the system is expected to be manufactured using standard methods, which also makes production costs low. The cable itself can also be very thin, and the cross-sectional area of the interconnection line is 0.4 mm by 0.25 mm, which is smaller than the typical copper variant.

This small, hair-like cable can be used to transmit data on three different parallel channels, bringing its total bandwidth to 105 Gbits per second. Bundling the ducts together can bring the cable into the terabyte per second range while still maintaining a reasonable cost.

The system uses chips at both ends of the cable, and the concept used is similar to that of Thunderbolt cables, although the conduits used are different. In each case, the chip in the cable is used to manage the data input to the cable at one end and output data at the other end, and also to handle the interface with the catheter itself.