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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.'"
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!
The difference is that, to do it with any kind of speed requires expensive materials like gallium arsenide. Intel is doing it with the standard silicon CMOS process which means that Joe Six Pack could afford a product with this technology.
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You're wrong.
Silicon is an indirect gap semiconductor . That means that the traditional methods of making light emitting devices (e.g. LEDs, the diode lasers in CD players - these things are based on compound semiconductors like GaAs and InGaAs) don't work in Si.
Previous integrated optics approaches have involved glomming III-V semiconductor lasers and photodetectors onto Si chips. This is unattractive from the engineering side for a number of reasons (cost, complexity, reliability).
Intel has figured out a way to make a Si laser based on Raman emission. The downside is that the Intel scheme still requires an external optical pump. An ideal scheme for integration would be an electrically pumped Si laser. This work is a necessary step on that road.