The Microphotonics Revolution

MycoMan writes "Interesting article about photonic switching research, but there's a sentence in it that reads: 'So far, communications systems have managed to keep up because the volume of phone calls, Web pages and videostreams that optical fibers can carry is doubling every nine months, thanks in large part to the ability to squeeze more wavelengths of light into each fiber.' Doubling every nine months - is this really true?" True or not, it's an interesting article. Enjoy.

Comments

Re:Photonic Motherboards?

[softsign]

These guys aren't saying they're going to build a motherboard with fibre-optic cables. They're talking about a silicon fabrication process that is used to build waveguides (micro-fibre-optic cables, if you will) into the silicon wafer itself.

It's not the speed of light that matters here (the speed of an electrical signal is virtually identical to a light signal) - it's the switching speed. Even with the best CMOS processes out there today, there is still a finite switching time - the time it takes a transistor to go from one logic level to the other - that presents a barrier to the maximum available processing speed of the chip. With decreasing size and voltage you can improve the speed of the chip, but there's only so far you can go.

These people are exploring the likelihood that you may be able to build something analogous to a transistor that acts upon photons instead of electrons.

If they can succeed in making these feasible - then you have a technology that is potentially 1) faster than CMOS and 2) much more efficient.

That is huge. It's not just a frivolous new motherboard with lots of unwieldly wires built into it. It would be a one-piece integrated design that would in all likelihood run very cool and perhaps even faster than microelectronics ever will.

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Gilder's Law...

[cperciva]

states that bandwidth increases by a factor of three every year. This means doubling every 7-8 months.

This, compared with Moore's law, has interesting consequences; among them the fact that as time goes to infinity processing power is expensive, while bandwidth is cheap. This is reflected in the differences between IPv4 and IPv6: while IPv4 has data fields tightly packed together, IPv6 spaces them out in a manner designed for easy access by software. While IPv4 optimizes bandwidth, IPv6 optimizes computational power.