extremetech.com — Engineers and physicists at MIT have devised a new method for integrating photonic circuitry onto a silicon chip, a discovery that could soon add the power and speed of light waves to traditional electronics.
Feb 7, 2007 View in Crawl 4
geekyFeb 8, 2007
I don't get digg... My link <a class="user" href="http://digg.com/tech_news/MIT_puts_optics_on_a_chip">http://digg.com/tech_news/MIT_puts_optics_on_a_chip</a>to a similar story was submitted hours before this submission. My link even included a white paper on the technology. I guess I don't have enough digg friends, to game the system.
bahimironFeb 8, 2007
I was kidding.You are not.Do not agree with me.I do not want to catch Crazy f**ker-itis.
motionaestheticFeb 8, 2007
For your own good, I'd try and break your habit. It's genuinely difficult to read - I sound things out in my mind, and this gets sounded out like a robot. Nobody is ever going to take you seriously if you type like that.
geminitojanusFeb 9, 2007
"I think the deal with optical computing is that light travels quite a bit faster (10x?) than electricity",Electrons travel at just below the speed of light. It's wire delay we're trying to beat here with photonics, as electrons take time to travel around bends and through squeezes in aluminum and copper, while light travels at the same speed through the chip's medium, regardless. Electrons also cause the copper to warm up, the laser shouldn't put off as much excess heat."and that light wouldnt stress optical traces with heat the way electricity does, and switching could possibly be done much faster"There's no such thing as an "optical trace", there's just be a valley lithographed into the chip where the laser bus needs to go. The biggest problem with lasers this size is focusing them (which is why it's almost certainly going to start out as a serial laser bus on chip), followed by power generation (which we've got a good handle on now). It also poses all kinds of new layout issues, which will probably make 10+ layer interconnects commonplace.
digitaldudFeb 9, 2007
Didn't Intel mention they have prototype optical chips now?