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| Before you drop a bunch of bucks on that next CPU upgrade......... [message #72598] |
Mon, 18 September 2006 09:25  |
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Deej [1]
Messages: 2149
Registered: January 2006
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A Chip That Can Transfer Data Using Laser Light
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: September 18, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 17 - Researchers plan to announce on Monday that they
have created a silicon-based chip that can produce laser beams. The advance
will make it possible to use laser light rather than wires to send data
between chips, removing the most significant bottleneck in computer design.
The development is a result of research at Intel, the world's largest chip
maker, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Commercializing the
new technology may not happen before the end of the decade, but the prospect
of being able to place hundreds or thousands of data-carrying light beams on
standard industry chips is certain to shake up both the communications and
computer industries.
Lasers are already used to transmit high volumes of computer data over
longer distances - for example, between offices, cities and across oceans -
using fiber optic cables. But in computer chips, data moves at great speed
over the wires inside, then slows to a snail's pace when it is sent
chip-to-chip inside a computer.
With the barrier removed, computer designers will be able to rethink
computers, packing chips more densely both in home systems and in giant data
centers. Moreover, the laser-silicon chips - composed of a spider's web of
laser light in addition to metal wires - portend a vastly more powerful and
less expensive national computing infrastructure. For a few dollars apiece,
such chips could transmit data at 100 times the speed of laser-based
communications equipment, called optical transceivers, that typically cost
several thousand dollars.
Currently fiber optic networks are used to transmit data to individual
neighborhoods in cities where the data is then distributed by slower
conventional wire-based communications gear. The laser chips will make it
possible to send avalanches of data to and from individual homes at far less
cost.
They could also give rise to a new class of supercomputers that could share
data internally at speeds not possible today.
The breakthrough was achieved by bonding a layer of light-emitting indium
phosphide onto the surface of a standard silicon chip etched with special
channels that act as light-wave guides. The resulting sandwich has the
potential to create on a computer chip hundreds and possibly thousands of
tiny, bright lasers that can be switched on and off billions of times a
second.
"This is a field that has just begun exploding in the past 18 months," said
Eli Yablonovitch, a physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles,
a leading researcher in the field. "There is going to be a lot more optical
communications in computing than people have thought."
Indeed, the results of the development work, which will be reported in a
coming issue of Optics Express, an international journal, indicate that a
high-stakes race is under way worldwide. While the researchers at Intel and
Santa Barbara are betting on indium phosphide, Japanese scientists in a
related effort are pursuing a different material, the chemical element
erbium.
Although commercial chips with built-in lasers are years away, Luxtera, a
company in Carlsbad, Calif., is already selling test chips that incorporate
most optical components directly into silicon and then inject laser light
from a separate source.
The Intel-Santa Barbara work proves that it is possible to make complete
photonic devices using standard chip-making machinery, although not entirely
out of silicon. "There has always been this final hurdle," said Mario
Paniccia, director of the Photonics Technology Lab at Intel. "We have now
come up with a solution that optimizes both sides."
In the past it has proved impossible to couple standard silicon with the
exotic materials that emit light when electrically charged. But the
university team supplied a low-temperature bonding technique that does not
melt the silicon circuitry. The approach uses an electrically charged oxygen
gas to create a layer of oxide just 25 atoms thick on each material. When
heated and pressed together, the oxide layer fuses the two materials into a
single chip that conducts information both through wires and on beams of
reflected light.
"Photonics has been a low-volume cottage industry," said John E. Bowers,
director of the Multidisciplinary Optical Switching Technology Center at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. "Everything will change and laser
communications will be everywhere, including fiber to the home."
Photonics industry experts briefed on the technique said that it would
almost certainly pave the way for commercialization of the long-sought
convergence of silicon chips and optical lasers. "Before, there was more
hype than substance," said Alan Huang, a former Bell Laboratories researcher
who is a pioneer in the field and is now chief technology officer of the
Terabit Corporation, a photonics start-up company in Menlo Park, Calif. "Now
I believe this will lead to future applications in optoelectronics
If I don't have one of these by next week, I will die......
;o)
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