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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.'"
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
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
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!
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.
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.
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.