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Intel Researchers Build Laser on Chip
Victor Ramen writes "Working with the basic material of computer chips, Intel Corp. researchers have constructed an all-silicon laser that could lead to computers one day harnessing light waves rather than electrical currents to shuttle data swiftly. 'Once you have silicon as an optical material, then you can take advantage of this enormous (silicon) infrastructure that exists around the world,' said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's photonics lab. 'You can imagine starting to siliconize photonic devices, and maybe integrate photonics and electronics.'"
I'll siliconize your photonic devices, if you integrate my electronics
Whatever happened to getting these things on friggin shark foreheads? Priorities, people!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
( ) FP
( ) Second Post
( ) Third Post
( ) None of the above
(*) Frickin' Lasers on Chips
Does this mean that overclocking them won't make them explode?
Instead, a precision hole will be burned through the casing from the cranked up laser.
Friggen cpus with friggen laser beams in their friggen silicon
There is this wonderful field called 'integrated optics'..
So this stuff is noting new.. Might be cool, but not news worthy at this point.
Might want to read up on things before one posts something.. IEEE even has groups for this sort of thing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
They have put a laser light on a chip. Nothing else, nothing more fancy than that. No applications yet. It's just cool, that's it.
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...WITH REMAINING EYE
User has reported that under high load the laptop gave him an unwanted castration. The wound was fully cauterised and the user now has an increased life expectancy.
We informed the user that the warning document is quite clear on page 98 paragraph 20, line 4 that a laptop should not be put on top of a lap but they chose to ignore this. I informed the user we would not be charging for the medical procedure our processor undertook, as a measure of our esteem for a valued customer. The user however is still demanding further action.
Recommendation: Send him a mouse mat.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Can it be aimed at an airliner?
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
In a fiber application you always have things like routers where the optical signal has to be converted to an electric signal, processed and then converted back to an optical signal. Designing the pcb to handle the high speed signals involved is non-trivial. If you get around the problem of having high speed signals on a pcb by keeping everything on the chip, things are much simpler. This should make things like routers and telephone switches cheaper and faster. In fact, I can see optical fiber being used on boards for chip interconnection. We might see boards with copper layers and an optical layer. In fact, the optical layer could be incorporated into the dielectric. I'm excited!
'Once you have silicon as an optical material, then you can take advantage of this enormous (silicon) infrastructure that exists around the world,'
Pamella Anderson should be very pleased. As am I; I often think of her enormous silicon infrastructure...
Currently one of major problems with lasers of any reasonable power is they require massive heat sinks. So, no.
Still waiting till liquid nitrogen pipes and connectors get integrated into motherboards and chips...
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
photonics with electronics, now that's what i called innovation. unfortunately the area was introduced some 30 years ago. so what's the deal, bill?
Whats the advantage of using a laser beam over a normal light source?
To grasp the significance of this, think of the difference between electrical and electronic devices.
Current photonic devices are at the same technological level as electric devices were before the invention of the integrated circuit and the "electronic" revolution occured.
If we're about to see an analog of the "electronic" revolution, but this time using photons instead of electrons, it's going to be absolutely amazing - and its effect will be as unpredictable as the effects of the electronic revolution (computers, the internet, and other radical consequences of the information age) were.
Fascinating times ahead.
I don't think the FBI will look too kindly on this development.
People have been staring at Hollywood actresses' boobs for ages, so the optical use of silicons isn't exactly a new thing.
Low calorie food! Chips-lite (light)! Hey, c'mon, I spent seconds thinking that one up!
Yes, but you now have to wear sunglasses.
Could they release that laser-on-chip device as a VHDL macro so I could implement it in my FPGA projects? I bet no, they would lose all the profit if people pirated the file and everyone could create one from readily availavle FPGA...
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Since the sharks will need chips inserted into their brains anyway (for remote control purposes) these chips could now utilize laser-on-chip tech. This would allow the the lasers to come directly out of the sharks' eyes. With the laser removed from the exterior of the shark, there will be no increased water drag, thus no reduction in speed. The sharks could in fact be overclocked for an increase in speed! The laser-on-chip-in-brain configuration would also allow the remote control death sharks to blend in with non-armed sharks without detection. Current models are easily spotted by their externally mounted lasers. The chip-in-brain mounted laser would of course destroy the sharks eyes when used, but they won't need them anyway because they're remote controlled. The opening from the brain mounted chips through the eyes could be made by... you guessed it, laser surgery performed from within the shark's own head. This greatly reduces the risk of infection from surgery. We're still awaiting approval from... never mind. PETA has contacted our office and... never mind. I for one welcome our... damn it! I promised I wouldn't say that.
If you can't just be yourself, then be more like me, ok?
here
You forgot
(*) Nothing to see here. Move along.
I thought the phrase "siliconize photonics" was familiar...
(Feb.04) Intel Devises Chip Speed Breakthrough
(Oct.04) Optical Control of Light on a Silicon Chip
Is there really any speed difference between sending a laser over a bus and sending and electrical signal down a wire. Doesn't electricity travel at c (the speed of light). I know that's just thoery and that in reality, it travels at less than c, but so does light going to any substance other than a vacuum. The other thing. Wires can be made really small, and still carry a current. Can we expect to fibre optic cables down to the same size?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Aren't laser LED's (as used in those $5 laser pointers) made of silicon?
Many fellow /.ers seem to wonder why this is newsworthy since integrated photonics is not something new. That's true. But the introduction of solid-state silicon-based lasers is nothing short of revolutionary.
The discussion and research, thus far, on integrated electronics has hit a road block. Electronics is a silicon-based techology; photonics, for the most (and better part) is not. Specifically, photonic devices, and in particular laser emitters, are made out of a group of materials known as III-V (called three-five) materials, in reference to their position in the corresponding tables of the periodic table (consider, for example, gallium-arsenide GaAs).
Silicon is not a III-V material. It belongs to column II of the periodic table (notice that columnnar position refers to atomic properties and not to the actual column of the table. For example, column III in the periodic table is spread over actual columns number 3 and 13).
The fact that silicon and III-V materials do not share common chemical and crystalline properties, as implied by their different positions on the periodic table, is detrimental. The mismatch in their crystalline structure makes the monolithic integration of tiny laser emitters on top of silicon chips, impossible.
Yet we all agree that optical interconnections between computer components are the key for electronic computers to become better and faster.
Since monolithinc integration of lasers and CPUs was impossible, till now, because of the materials' mismatch we had to resort to the following limited ways of engaging photonics in computing:
(a) use of photonics for long-haul data transfer, ie, optical interconnects between entire computers, aka, optical networks; they are great and fast but we still face the bottlenect at the points of conversion between optical and electronic signals.
(b) hybrid optoelectronic chips; consider a silicon chip with pads on which a GaAs photonic chip rests. The two chips exchange signals thru these pads. The drawback here is the rather poor yields in fabrication and the high cost due to limited demand (and applications) for such devices.
(c) all optical computers. This was sort of a chimera for many researchers (myself included). While the idea and the concept are promising the implementation is extremely difficult and the promise of quantum computers, now, makes optical data processing a thing of the past.
Ideally we want a CPU chip made of silicon capable of emitting and receiving light. The photonic component was very difficult on silicon. Silicon is not an ideal material for coherent light emision, neither does it detect light easily. You need a larger area to sense light on silicon, than on GaAs, making silicon photodetectors rather large and thus affecting the scale of integration.
What Intel appears to have done now, is to introduce a way to monolithically integrate laser sources on silicon chips. They have solved a problem that has been open for years. Their solution will catalyze a field that has been waiting years for such a breakthrough. We knew what to do but we did not have the technology to do it. Intel just gave us the technology we've been expecting.
Then again, this new LSD will probably be very nasty when it produces that very clear and bright image on your screen - in that you can't see it after 10 minutes of working.
But laser holograms would be possible - allowing a clear "Leia" like projection with high-resolution 'static' lasers, instead of high speed scanning lasers.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
II for one, welcome our new silicon laser overlords...
how long until
Don't you love article summaries that read like press releases?
Lord knows the residual beams will hit a plane and I'll get 25 years for changing my graphics card.
My best sig is this one.
siliCON vs siliCONE
silicon ain't all that shapely
Great we will finally see optical get the mass production scale advanatages we have seen in other chip based solutions. The Firewire 3200 standard has been set years ago (at the same time as firwire 800 electronic) and now we can see it becomming cheaper and cheaper until it is made default for ibooks. No more disconecting from the internet when there is a thunderstorm as there are no conducting connections. Cool.
I wonder if we will see the optical chips on the port or integrated in the plug so that there is no fiber allignment issue.
Eventually the system bus will be optical and you will not be able to break any hardware with hot plug and play.
PS When will your lan use entanglement for security key exchanges?
Silicon is not silicone.
Just curious.
Theoretically, maybe; firing excess heat in the form of a laser is probably possible. In practice, this sort of laser doesn't get us any closer.
Well yeah, I can get a SMT laser diode overnighted to me, so the idea is nothing new.
Where the real action is, is the possible connection with the Cell processor, whos premise kindof relies on onboard gigabit+ . I think we all assumed gb/copper, but now...
(Better start saving up for that PS? if this homeboy files!)
-- Just another unsolicited opinion... from the Peanut Gallery.
a bionic implant of said chip onto a sharks forhead.
"Quick, lab guys, we need some good news!"
"What about lasers? Lasers are futuristic and cool, aren't they?"
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
(*) Lasers on sharks
'Once you have silicon as an optical material, then you can take advantage of this enormous (silicon) infrastructure that exists around the world,' said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's photonics lab.
I dream of a day when we can make optical material out of ordinary sand!
I hate to be the one to correct myself, but it just seems like yesterday this was announced. I double-checked my own facts, and it was September 2001 that Motorola demonstrated the capability to implement GaAs on SiO2 wafers, for RF, laser, and other purposes.
Photonic engineer: Hey, you got computer chips in my lasers!
Computer engineer: Hey, you got lasers in my computer chips!
Both: Hmm...
Don't sweat the petty things. Don't pet the sweaty things. --Stephen J. Simmons
"Turion" sounds very, very similar to the way "Durian" is pronounced in several southeast asian languages.
A Durian, is a large, porcipine-like fruit that when ripe and cut open, smells and tastes like a mix of a sulphur factory (or rotten garlic or onions) and a lush, creamy custard. The smell is so pungent that you can smell it from a hundred feet away. Many people are so put off by the smell that in public areas like airports and hotel lobbies they have signs that say "No Durians"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A255575
Is isn't clear from the way you worded it, but: This silicon modulator is dramatically (50x) faster than any previous silicon modulator. It isn't yet as fast as other non-silicon solutions, but it is far cheaper. So much cheaper that is changes what can be done with fiber instead of wire.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Assuming by "normal" you meant LED's, there isn't any way to make an LED out of Silicon. As far as I know, there are three mechanisms for producing light emiting devices from Silicon: :-)
1. This method.
2. A poorly-understood process involving nanoscale emitters and electron tunneling (which only works in the lab, so far).
3. You can build an incandescent element out of Silicon
-Mark
Aren't half the pins earth's to stop the noise?
Switching to light would allow super high speed parallel interfaces because there's no electromagnetic interference.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
> ... appears to have done now, is to introduce a
> way to monolithically integrate laser sources on
> silicon chips.
And they call the chips....
Sharks.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
I wonder if this will make trinary or quarternary signalling practical. That would help data throughput quite a bit.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)