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

Red Herring

[The Gardener]

Yeah, Red Herring carried the story, and with a little lower "fluff factor". At least, it seemed to me . . .

The Gardener

Re:Red Herring

[tswinzig]

Yeah, Red Herring [redherring.com] carried the story, and with a little lower "fluff factor". At least, it seemed to me . . .

That's strange, since the byline on the MSNBC article says they got it from Red Herring. I guess the MS in MSNBC has their editors used to trimming articles for the lowest common denominator?

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: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

Cheaper, maybe, cheap? No.

[bertok]

Slashdot is not the only publication with bad editors! To quote the article: "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."

Well, not quite. You see, the article later mentions that Infinera used InP (Indium Phosphide) chips instead of silicon, probably because they needed it's superior electrical and optical properties. With InP, it's possible to make 100 GHz circuits, but not cheaply. Certainly not for the same cost as a modern, silicon CPU.

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?

Re:Questions???

[BakaMark]

What will our test instruments look like?

At least there is one current example of this today. There are devices that are used to tap optical fibre lines, that work by actually splicing into the line.

These devices have been around for a number of years now, and I have heard of one such device being able to tap an optical fibre bundle that has 50 individual optical fibres within it. Of course it will leave the optical pathways semi-intact, and detection is only by using complex test gear on either end that will tell you the consistency of the fibre as well as the points where the joins have been made. These things are usefull if you want to wiretap an optical fibre cable.

Of course removing such a device from the optical fibre bundle will effectively break the connection.

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.

change of address

[tux-sucks]

Indium Phosphide Valley, anyone?

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:Makes you wonder

[J. J. Ramsey]

I'm not so sure that photons not having mass means that they have no inertia. Photons have momentum, can exert a (very) slight pressure, and can be pulled on by gravity. Given that, their inertia is likely to me small, but nonzero.

Where's the beef?

[apk]

I read the article -- verbatim -- in Red Herring's printed rag. There's no meat to that article. What exactly is it that this thumb-sized chip does, and how/where will this device be used (to reduce cost, or increase functionality, or increase circuit density per rack, or...) in the optical systems being deployed by the optical carriers?

Does this chip offer SONET layer switching (or muxing/demuxing)? SONET layer Performance Monitoring? Does it bring anything to the DWDM playing field, in either the long-haul or metro arenas?

Optical carriers buy optical transmission and switching systems, not components, with accompanying network management platforms to operate, integrate, and manage it.

I ask again, where's the beef? As it is, this is just a glorified press release.

Andy

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.

Beer Chips? Old News

[Tokerat]

Yes but when will they have microchips than can control the flow of beer?

...This one keeps the flow going pretty steadily. :-D

skip it...

[doooras]

what we need are isolinear chips and optronic relays

maybe throw in a few bioneural gelpacks

Re:Makes you wonder

[harvardian]

Being pulled-on by gravity doesn't mean anything. Gravity (according to Einstein) is the warping of space-time, so things that are massless still experience it. According to Newton's equations, that wasn't the case.

zero REST mass, in theory, and YMMV

[StandardDeviant]

But while the current theory holds that mass is invariant, the particle's _energy_ (which, when you think about it, is what you're worried about anyway) is most certainly not invariant. Since these little fellows are zipping along at a literally astronomic clip, even the "massless" photon has energy. IIRC, experiemental data held the mass of a photon as being something like 3.9x10^-(12?15?) that of the already quite svelte electron...
Electric fields generate magnetic fields, and both can in theory interfere with the propagation of electromagnetic waves, which are the other side of the photon coin (really, at that level, what is a wave? what is a particle? they're two ways of looking at the same thing. actually this is valid all size levels, but the wave/particle duality effects for anything larger than an angel's behind is vanishing, incredibly, stunningly small)
Besides, I was under the impression that quantum tunneling was the origin of some of the migration patterns in (or should I say through?) circuits. The lighter a particle is, the more prone it is to this "now I'm here, FOOLED YA! now I'm there" behavior... I'm too lazy to go dig up my pchem text, i'm sure somebody will follow up with a more precise explanation and some of the relevant equations. (I'm not a particle physicist, just a chemist, but we do rub elbows occasionally, much like every now and again a molecular biologist will talk to the chemists next door ;-))
This is not to say this isn't a cool advance. It's just that I'm even more curious now as to how they got the magic chip to work, given what I imagine the physical and technical hurdles were...

Re:zero REST mass, in theory, and YMMV

[rainwalker]

Ah, glad to see a fellow P Chem student here! I have my book handy, and so I figured I'd make a stab at posting that more precise explanation you asked for.

Tunneling has to do with the energy of the particle. In the one-dimensional particle in the box theory, the transmission coefficient T is given by an equation that I cannot reproduce due to the ascii art issues, but is a roughly second-order polynomial curve when plotted as T versus E/V0, where E is the energy of the particle and V0 is the "height" of the potential barrier, moving from T=0 at E/V0=0 to T=~1 at E/V0=~2. This would mean that the higher energy of the particle, the higher of a potential barrier needed to prevent tunneling. Now, free electrons have higher energy than photons, so it would be harder to contain them, as it were. Plus, this isn't the only issue. Photons have no charge, and so are undisturbed by electrical and magnetic fields, but electrons of course are negatively charged, which complicates things in 2 main ways, first they do not travel in a straight line (like photons), and having 2 narrowly separated regions with different charges (such as in a transistor) will lower the potential barrier. I believe this is why SOI (silicon-on-insulator) is useful, as it makes it more difficult for the electrons to migrate from region to region.

I hope this helps some, and if I am wrong, feel free to correct me!

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

Re:If you keep clicking next enough times,

[stubear]

I think you'll find you're wrong. Open both side by side and scroll through the MSNBC article. You'll find they have the exact same sections which are exactly the same length and both end on the "Absolutely Fab" section. The ONLY difference I found in content was in the subtitle. The Red Herring article contained a semicolon followed by a qualitative comment about everything prior. The MSNBC article only contained the subtitle leading up to but not including the semicolon and qualitative comment.

Re:Makes you wonder

[cornjones]

gravitons (the particles we hypothesis are responsible for gravity but have not been able to observe) are generated in proportion to the mass of an object. the object they are working on doesn't (i believe) need to have mass

But gravity is such a weak force that the mutual attraction (ie both objects be attracted to each other) is often necessary for any significant effect.

That being said, light can be/is observably effected by large gravity producing bodies (stars, etc...) and would stand to reason that there is some effect by smaller gravitational pulls, even if that effect is, as yet, unobservable to us.