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.

About time

[dorpus]

They've been trying to build optical computing chips since the 1980s. I did a summer internship in Japan in 1990, when they were making custom batches of exotic rare-earth crystals for fiber-optic relay stations.

What does this do to the FSB-multiplier setup?

[ZachPruckowski]

Obviously this boosts bandwidth and cuts latency (like mad), but doesn't this kill the current FSB speed and multiplier method? I mean, your clock speed is FSB clock x multiplier, so what happens if you replace the FSB with a laser?

A huge advance?

[Coppit]

From what I recall in physics class electrons travel at 2/3 c. So at best this means that memories and chips can be 50% further apart, or that clocks can go 50% faster. Or is there more to this?

New Techniques...

[skogs]

This makes me wonder about the future new techniques this could be used for. Never mind the obvious inter-chip communication...how about visual systems?

Could this, with another 10 years of evolution and the advancement of color coordination and multi-colored laser chips, provide incredibly high contrast and accurate projections? This is like DLP projectors on steroids. They don't simply reflect light one pixel at at time, they actually create the laser one pixel at a time.

I also was wondering what the 3D applications would be like. Perhaps an R2D2 unit fitted with one of these would have a much sharper and sexier image of the princess asking for OB1's help.

Also, how about a laser weapon targeting system that can lase 100 targets at once for all the bomblets?

Great things are going on in my mind.

This is going to take awhile

[baggins2001]

I be it will take at least 5 to 10 years to see this on a standard desktop/server system.
My biggest concern is reliability. How many people are running SANS with redundant Fiber optic connections. Why? because the lasers fail. Could you imagine if you had a motherboard built with multiple lasers for on board communication. Yeah it would be fast, right up until the time one of those lasers failed.
InP lasers on silicon is new technology and is quite a ways from being producible in a mass market chip. Manufacturers have enough trouble getting gates, isolation, contacts for silicon devices reproduced. Now tell them to create a step where they put a laser in there and I bet it will take them 2-3 years design and 3 years to get a manufacturing process. (Can anyone say copper level metal?).
Hopefully this isn't something that completely patentable, because this is where the consumers would benefit from competition.
From a manufacturing perspective, I would rather be stuck trying to implement TaO gates.

Power anyone?

[lixee]

I just had a course on advanced VLSI design, where the Professor relies on [Kibar, VanBlerkom, Fan, Esener, J Lightwave Techn., vol. 17, p. 546, 1999] to approximate a couple of Watts for optical interconnects. This is clearly not acceptable.
I'm interrested in how they manage to keep the power consumption reasonable. Till then, I call hype!

Space Based Processors

[Anonymous Coward]

I see this as a BIG advance for the space industry. Optical processors, or at least something close to it helps with the radiation hardening factor. You don't have the latest and greatest Itanium Willamithon Quad Core processor to throw around up there. You have radiation hardened pentium 2 equivelent processors. If we could have a significant boost in processor ability in space we could have much more sophisticated and artificially intelligent probes and machines searching the universe.