MSNBC on Infinera's Optical Chip

pnoti writes: "This article at MSNBC is a loose overview of Infinera's new chip with circuits that control the flow of light instead of the flow of electrons. 'If this chip performed as they hoped, it would shatter many of the theoretical limits regarding the behavior of light in optical communications networks.'" Update: 04/10 04:26 GMT by T : That's MSNBC, not The New York Times -- oops.

Comments

Photonic bandgap technology

[Vireo]

Well, they are certainly not the firsts to make photonic chips. Optical mux/demux (cascaded couplers) are routinely built as planar waveguides on semiconductor materials. However, the size of their chip seems really small, which suggests that they use photonic bandgap technology, which uses very small arrays of refraction index changes in which light at certain wavelenght can't propagate to make it perform tricks, like turning at 90 degrees on very small distance. However, I didn't saw any mention of this in the article. Anyone can confirm it is the case?

Re:Photonic bandgap technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Your are missing the point.
Of course, optical components have been out for years. But no body was able to create an optic-based IC. That is, until Infinera.

Re:Photonic bandgap technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Photonic IC in InP can use low-loss curved optical waveguides with bending radius down to 30 microns. There are no commercial photonic IC's at the moment that are based on photonic bandgap technology.

For an example of what's possible in today's InP technology have a look at these circuits from Delft University and ThreeFive photonics in the Netherlands. They show a photograph of the bare chip containing a 4-wavelength optical crossconnect on 1.5 mm by 3 mm! This is without use of photonic bandgap structures (which could in principle reduce the size even further).

Re:Makes you wonder

[Soko]

From the article:

Hardly. Infinera's thumbnail-size chip is the first integrated photonic circuit. Though Infinera won't reveal the chip's cost, when built with manufacturing techniques used by chip makers like Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, it likely could be made very cheaply. The savings in manufacturing in turn would lower the cost of network equipment by half, perhaps even more. Beleaguered network carriers like Level 3 Communications and bankrupt Global Crossing could build networks for much less, and run them more efficiently and at a lower cost--maybe even profitably. For consumers, Infinera's chip could be instrumental in allowing communications companies to offer high-speed Internet access at affordable prices. And one day this technological breakthrough could lead to a device capable of projecting a holographic display, as on the TV series Star Trek.

Pretty much refutes your points.

The best thing about photonics is the absence of (photon) migration, which is a big problem with small trace size electronics (electron migration). (Aside: If a silicon engineer knows better, please correct me.) No migration happens because photons have 0 rest mass, and therefore don't have intertia. This means they are a lot less likely to over shoot the switching mechanism, and maintian signal. This is in addition to thier electrical interference resistance.

Commercial products may take a while to come to fruition since there will have to be some major re-tooling at the fabs, but with so many huge benefits, it'll come sooner than you think.

Now, where to put that Holodeck....

Soko

Questions???

[Anonymous Coward]

Well suppose one day everything that is electronic today becomes optical.

What will our test instruments look like? What will be the units of measure?
How is work done in an optical device? Will we have 'fiber buss bars' a la Outland that carry 'DC light' everywhere?
Will we have to break open circuits to measure things a la current probe?

Will there be optical equivalents of everything electronic or will the optical stuff be a specialized peripheral of electronic devices?

Is this really a photonic switch?

[Animats]

From the description, this is a switch or router on a chip with optical in/out, but the usual transistor processing. The innovation is that the lasers and receivers are on the same chip as the switch.

There are true optical switches (from Nortel, for example), although they're circuit switches for backbone links. An optical IP router is a ways off.

Light

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't this theoretically be thrown off by light nearby? Like internal LEDS for the power switch?

Straight-thru

[lostchicken]

For this to be any good, the signal path must be pure optics, e.g. the same photon must go all the way thru the switch, and just be routed around. That means the switch would have to understand the rays of light out my 100baseFX network, or fibrechannel bus, and deal with it in photonic form.

This solves EMF issues, and other nasties. Electronics could be used for low speed control, and indicators, but fibre be used for ALL high speed stuff, including PCB traces and everything else.

Anybody developed optical solder yet... ;-)

Re:Where's the beef?

[ckedge]

Absolutely.

This article is the equivalent of Bell Labs EXECUTIVES and CEO's claiming that they were in the process of single handedly pulling the transistor out of their a**es, before the transistor had even been created yet.

It ignores the 20-30 years of physics and engineering physics that came before it, it ignores the thousands of people and hundreds of groups who have been working at the dozens of different approaches to this EXACT problem, and it ignores the engineers who actually came up with the designs for the devices they are intending to use, and the related background between all of these.

I should know. I spent four years doing a degree on one possible approach to creating the exact components they claim they are working on. I worked with InGaAs/InGaAsP/InP Quantum Well structures and one possible method of creating a fundamental process to modify such a structure into the types of devices they are thinking about. We were thinking ahead to the exact thing that they are thinking of.

And we ourselves were basing our work on 10-15 years of other people's work. The first people who came up with the possibility of using non-silicon semiconductors was 3+ decades ago, and of creating fully integrated InP/etc based all optical ciruits is about 20-30 years old.

SSSCA workaround?

[autopr0n]

Hrm, If the SSSCA passes as is, it will dissallow "electonic digital" devices from being used without copy protection. But it dosn't say anything about optical digital devices :P