Fiber On Your Motherboard...Soon!

km790816 writes: "In this post I joked about wanting an optical bus on my PC. In the last week I've seen two articles from The Register and EETimes discussing the real possibility. Both mention high bandwidth and lower heat and power usage. Sounds good to me."

Comments

Optical on the motherboard..

[ldopa1]

This would put SCSI on the skids. Right now SCSI is the only really fast interface commonly available between devices, but it's cost has kept it from becoming the standard. But if you could just plug in a fiber connection, you'd be rocking. Another thought is that fiber network cards wouldn't be far away. It'd be cool to buy a LinkSys Fiberboard at CompUSA for 30 bucks and be able to network all of your computers in house that way. Of course wireless technology is already pushing the limit farther.

Also, Time magazine reported last year about this, and they pointed out that the kind of speed offered by fiber is the only real bottleneck to creating a truly self aware computer. They also mentioned that MIT was working on a Laser circuit, where logic is figured out by the paths of a laser moving through space.

The only real application of this at the current time is in device to device communications. We'd have to rework all silicon chips to use the new protocols.

Another problem is that we'd still have the silicon-to-light translation bottleneck. i.e. and electrical signal from a pin on a chip needs to be converted to laserlight somehow. To make this truly work, you'd need a chip that reponds via light, and I haven't seen any IC's that communicate via light yet. Of course, I doubt that they are very far around the corner.