nytimes.com — 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.
Sep 18, 2006 View in Crawl 4
sonofagunnSep 18, 2006
What really makes this awesome is that all the other components are in place to take advantage of this. The company mentioned in the article, Luxtera, has been mentioned on Slashdot a few times because they have working silicon-based optical interconnects. Soon, components will be communicating at the speed of light!
zippoSep 18, 2006
Primedeath, don't make me hit you with my +9 Club of Troll Smashing.
Closed AccountSep 18, 2006
Encoding and Decoding? It's just a diode. That's how they work: light comes in, current goes out; or vice-versa, current comes in, light goes out.
theron1nSep 18, 2006
zebov, don't confuse the photon's travel time with the maximum period. The correct period should be based on the hardware's ability to decode the photons back to bits since this is astronomically slower than the time spent by the photon in the optic cable.
justice7Sep 18, 2006
there is a lot to be gained from thisheat is the biggest enemy of circuits, and photons would be much cooler temperature wise than electrons at the same data rate. (need a physics guy to confirm that)i think its a great idea, another way of looking at circuits.
Closed AccountSep 19, 2006
I was just pointing out that there is still a (relatively) large delay between two points separated by a "large" distance even at the speed of light. Wire-path delays are usually measured in picoseconds in modern processors; this delay is much larger than that. It's better than copper, but it's not instantaneous as one tends to think when they see "speed of light."