Intel Announces Lasers On a Chip

wonkavader writes, "The New York Times reports that '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 work is from Intel and the University of California, Santa Barbara. This suggests breakthroughs in both computing performance and networking." From the article: "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." Further details in the Intel press release.

Switching

[Zebadias]

I think this will be of more use to optical switching - if you have the ability to switch and route on your fibernetwork without changing from optical to electrical and back again you can switch much faster and more efficiently.

Re:Switching

[jimstapleton]

the laser is still being generated by the chip (and hence, I suspect, by elecrtical), so I don't think that works.

The computer science effect.

[Cybert4]

Put a lot of people who know a bit about computer science (linux, PHP, etc. ) and have them comment on a hard science. They don't even know enough hard physics and math to even rate their own skills. All they can do is joke about it. Enough with the sharks.

Re:What does this do to the FSB-multiplier setup?

[Sebastopol]

Pushing the FSB is much harder due to the platform. The physical interconnect is far noisier than on die routing, and the distribution of those signals to the memory and/or IO controller is very messy. That's why FSBs are so much slower (or if they are faster, or usually dedicated point-2-point busses).

To reap the benefits of optics outside the package you'd need an optical socket and a radically new kind of mobo design.

Give it 20 more years...

What this breakthrough really means

[MetaDFF]

By using optical links, this breakthough will solve some of the problems we have today with sending data at high speed across chip to chip busses. The major problem today with sending data at high rates between chips is the losses incurred by travelling across the FR-4 PCB. As the data rates go up, the greater the losses incurred, the more difficult it is to recover the data being sent. Optical interconnects have significantly less losses at high data rates, thus making them a suitable technology for chip to chip communications in the future. This is a breakthrough because now we can integrate exotic optical materials with low cost silicon using standard chip-making equipment. This was something that could not be done in the past.

I have questions about the usefulness of this

[smellsofbikes]

1. Why lasers? Why not just light? At the distances they're talking, does coherence and phase matter? Incoherent light is just as fast, and if you're shooting it into waveguides and it's coming out the other end, as long as you're not multiplexing data on a given waveguide what advantage does this give? (I honestly don't know: maybe there's a great reason.)

2. They're still bonding indium phosphide onto an existing chip. When they can use photolithography to build a billion lasers on the chip itself, rather than having to glue separate lasers onto a chip, that'll be really impressive. That's why so much effort is being focussed (pardon me) on developing silicon lasers [brown.edu] rather than exotics attached to silicon.

Re:I have questions about the usefulness of this

[Fordiman]

"as long as you're not multiplexing data on a given waveguide what advantage does this give?"

The ability to multiplex data on any given waveguide (ie: boost bandwidth per lead)