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Intel Devises Chip Speed Breakthrough
Chad Wood writes "According to the New York Times (free reg. req.), Intel has demonstrated a research breakthrough, making silicon chips that can switch light like electricity. The article explains:''This opens up whole new areas for Intel,' said Mario Paniccia, a an Intel physicist, who started the previously secret Intel research program to explore the possibility of using standard semiconductor parts to build optical networks. 'We're trying to siliconize photonics.' The invention demonstrates for the first time, Intel researchers said, that ultrahigh-speed fiberoptic equipment can be produced at personal computer industry prices. As the costs of communicating between computers and chips falls, the barrier to building fundamentally new kinds of computers not limited by physical distance should become a reality, experts say.'"
... is the coolest technology you've never heard of.
For some reason, buried among a zillion dog-eared back issues of "People" and "Sports Illustrated" at the Seattle's Best Coffee shop at the corner of Central and Kirkland Way in Kirkland, Washington, somebody left a copy of Photonics Spectra in the magazine rack. I'm an electronics geek who had never heard of the field, and I probably spent three hours and two quad-damage lattes poring over that magazine. Fucking amazing stuff. Spend some time at the photonics.com website if you don't believe me.
Seriously, photonics looks like it might be the Next Big Thing.
I love generalization.
Three states have been around awhile it's called Tri-state Logic. Gordon Moore gave an interview in PC Magazine. He discussed multi-state logic, but said it was a non issue. He said that neural networks were much more important breakthrough.
Having not read the paper, it's hard to say how great this works, but it's worth mentioning that optical microchip clocking may be a major development over the coming decade. As clock speeds get faster (4GHz anyone?), small variations called clock skew and jitter become critical difficulties. Basically, because the clock signal doesn't propagate in an exactly predictable amount of time, different chip parts end up out of sync. Because optical clocking would rely on waveguides, with faster transmission and using uncharged particles that don't pick up random electrical signals, sending clock signals via light waves could be very beneficial. Of course, this development only speaks of the sending end - the modulator - not the receiving end, but we can be sure that Intel and many others are hard at work developing this technology.