Lasers may send information flying in tiny bursts of light through optical fibers across oceans and cities. But youre still in the electronic slow lane when youre transferring high-definition videos or other large files between devices. Then the content travels only at the rate permitted by the U.S.B. or other cord.

But soon, some data exchanges between consumer gadgets may travel at the higher rate of fiber optics, letting people transfer a Blu-ray version of ?Gone With the Wind, for example, or the complete family photo archive in less than a minute.

Later this year, Intel will introduce its Light Peak fiber optic link, in a bid to replace U.S.B. and other electrical cables that now connect computers with digital cameras, music players, smartphones and dozens of other devices, said Jason Ziller, Intels director for the optical input-output program office. Light Peak optical cable technology, which includes computer chips and miniature lasers, will be available to manufacturers later this year, he said, for installation in products next year. Prices are not yet available from Intel.

The first version of the optical cable will transmit 10 gigabits per second of data both ways, and is expected to scale to 100 gigabits a second in the next decade, Mr. Ziller said.

By contrast, the high-bandwidth U.S.B. 2.0 cables now in wide use have a rate of 480 megabits a second. The new U.S.B. 3.0 specification now in development has a theoretical maximum data rate of up to 5 gigabits a second, said Richard Brown, vice president for marketing at VIA Technologies, a semiconductor design house in Taiwan that is using the U.S.B. 3.0 standard in two new chips. He said the chips would soon be available in consumer products.

Optics may also get a boost from new technology that is still in the laboratory and is intended to integrate lasers directly into silicon chips as they are manufactured. Typically, lasers must be either packaged separately, or grafted onto a chip after it is formed, a relatively expensive procedure.

But at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a research group has achieved a breakthrough, creating lasers directly on silicon chips as part of their manufacturing, said Lionel C. Kimerling, a professor of materials science and engineering and director of the MIT Microphotonics Center. Dr. Kimerling and colleagues, including Jurgen Michel and Jifeng Liu, have developed and demonstrated lasers made from germanium, a material used in advanced silicon chip manufacturing processes. Chips are made in layers, and the germanium lasers are built into the chip during the layering process.

The germanium laser is an unusual and significant discovery, said Michael Hochberg, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. ?Integrating lasers onto silicon chips this way is a milestone in the field, he said, one that might result in inexpensive ways to bring the high bandwidth of optics to many consumer items.

PHILIPPE M. FAUCHET, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester, agreed that the germanium laser was an important advance. ?For 20 years there has been an intense search for how we could make a light source out of silicon, Professor Fauchet said. ?Meanwhile, Kimerling has taken a different path with germanium, which can be used with standard lithographic techniques for fabricating wafers.

Germanium lasers may speed communication by eliminating the need for many of the tiny copper pathways on each high-performance computer chip that connect its different areas, carrying data, for instance, from the processor to memory, he said. ?As much as 11 miles of copper can be on a chip, he said.

Fiber-optic communication could also connect different chips, providing, for instance, a high-bandwidth path between a computers central processing unit and the graphics processor.

The germanium in the Kimerling laser was coaxed to make light by adding phosphorus, then by applying a small amount of mechanical strain to pull its atoms a bit apart, Dr. Kimerling said.

Many steps lie ahead before the laser can be produced commercially, Dr. Fauchet said, including demonstrating that the efficiency of conversion from electrical power to optical power is reasonable.

If used successfully, inexpensive optical connections could drastically change the speed at which consumer devices and the chips within them exchange information. ?The bottom line here is bandwidth density, Professor Hochberg said.

?With optics, you will get big pipes ? many more bits per second.

Mr. Wens remarks, which echoed a rebuke on Thursday by one of Chinas central bankers, were perhaps the sharpest yet in a brewing disagreement between Beijing and Washington over the two nations economic positions.

In a more than two hour news conference at the close of Chinas annual legislative session, Mr. Wen repeated that China will keep its currency, the renminbi, ?basically stable despite calls by the United States and other developed nations to let its value increase.

He also repeated the concerns he voiced a year ago, at Chinas last legislative session, that the United States is failing to rebuild its own economy and maintain the value of the dollar. Protecting the dollar, which dropped sharply since the global crisis began in late 2008, is a matter of ?national credibility for the United States, he said.

?Any fluctuation in the value of the U.S. currency is a big concern for us, he said. ?I hope the United States will take concrete steps to reassure investors. It is not only in the interests of the investors, but also the United States itself.

Chinese leaders fear that the United States vast budget deficits will lead to inflation that effectively devalues the dollar, and thus the value of Chinas vast foreign-currency reserves. Those reserves exceeded $2.4 trillion at the end of 2009, with nearly $900 billion of that in dollar-denominated Treasury bills.

Mr. Wens most pointed remarks, however, were aimed at critics of Chinas economic policies, led by the United States. Those critics accuse China of keeping the value of its currency artificially low, so that its exports will remain cheap compared to other nations competing products. That boosts Chinas economy, but at the expense of other trading partners, they say.

China has pegged the renminbi to the declining value of the dollar since the economic crisis began in late 2008. Were it to let the market judge the renminbis value, critics say, the currency ? and the cost of Chinese products ? would rise.

In Sundays news conference, Mr. Wen bluntly rejected that view. Instead, in remarks that seemed aimed at the United States, he accused unnamed competitors of trying to bail out their own slumping economies by hamstringing the Chinese juggernaut.

?I understand some economies want to increase their exports, he said, ?but what I dont understand is the practice of depreciating ones own currency and attempting to force other countries to appreciate their own currencies, just for the purpose of increasing their own exports.

That amounts to trade protectionism, he said, and ?all countries should be fully alarmed by such developments.

Some economic analysts were struck by the comments.

?I think its my first time hearing government officials saying that. Basically, Premier Wen said its a kind of protectionism to ask other countries to appreciate their currency and depreciate their own currency, Shen Minggao, the chief China economist for Citibank in Hong Kong, said in a telephone interview. ?In that sense, its a new understanding of currency policies.

Mr. Wen argued that the renminbi is not unfairly valued, citing government calculations that suggested that, measured in real terms, Chinas currency had actually risen in value at the height of the economic crisis.

One leading Chinese economist, Bai Chong-En of Beijings Tsinghua University, said in an interview on Sunday that for a broad range of technical reasons, he does not believe that the renminbi is seriously undervalued. But he also suggested that Western jawboning to revalue the currency is having the opposite effect.

?The greater the outside pressure, the more difficult it is for the Chinese government to raise the exchange rate, and the more difficult it is for the Chinese people to accept a revaluation of the Chinese currency, he said. ?People dont like to be forced to change things. They have be willing to do it.

In his wide-ranging news conference, which drew on both Chinese and foreign questioners, Mr. Wen repeated some boilerplate government positions ? China is an underdeveloped nation that will need a century or more to reach advanced status, he said ? and a few new ones.

Addressing a chorus of complaints by foreign investors, he said China will ?put in place institutional arrangements to level the playing ground for foreign companies in China, and promised to personally meet with foreign business leaders during his final years in office. Some of Chinas economic stimulus measures, such as subsidizing purchases of new automobiles and home appliances, applied to products by foreign as well as domestic manufacturers, he noted.

He also said that he had been excluded from a crucial meeting of world leaders at last years Copenhagen conference on climate change, and had not deliberately skipped the meeting, as some at the conference charged. Mr. Wens absence from that session, which was attended by President Obama and other leaders, has been touted by critics as a symbol of Chinas intransigence on climate issues at the conference, which ended without reaching many of its key goals.

?Why was China not notified of this meeting? So far no one has given us any explanation about it, and it still is a mystery, he said.

Mr. Wens news conference was broadcast nationally, but in Beijing, that reply and several following minutes of the broadcast were abruptly cut off by what was described as a loss of the television signal.