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Intel Announces Laser Breakthrough
AdmiralWeirdbeard writes "Intel has just announced a breakthrough in laser technology allowing a continuous laser wave on a silicon chip. Apparently they devised a method to sap the interfering field of electrons previously generated in silicon by the lasers. Intel says that hardware exploiting the advance might begin appearing at the end of the decade."
Silicon: is there anything it can't do? Seriously, it'll be interesting to see how this impacts optical storage, not to mention all the other places lasers are used.
Ok it sounds cool... but what is the intended purpose of this breakthrough?
From TFA: The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has created a chip containing eight continuous Raman lasers by using fairly standard silicon processes rather than the somewhat expensive materials and processes required for making lasers today.
OK, so I'm probably missing some major point here, but, define "expensive" for making lasers, given that there is a laser in every cheap £20 CD player, cheap £30 DVD player, cheap £5 laser pointer... Can't be that expensive, surely?
"She's furniture with a pulse"
Hybrid optical-electronic chips are ussed mainly in highspeed net hardware. $$$ is the reason you haven't seen them in your desktop. I am fascinated by it more than quantum because it seems far off.
optoelectronics defined by Intel article.
More info. Just google Optoelectronics.
Fiber optics:
IIRC fiber optics networks still have to use electronic switches, hubs, routers, etc, that means that the data has to be converted from photonic to electronic and back at every switch/router/anything that actually processes it. This causes a huge slow down in comparison to what a pure light switch/router/etc. could perform.
what the big deal is about is basically that intels raman laser represents another step towards having cheap electron to photon interconnects (and cheap fiber optic amps, although funnily the said the efficiency was only around 5%, but i can still see its significance). i drool at the thought of having my CPU connected to my RAM via an optical bus!(and cheaply too i must add, as this is currently possible, but would be very costly)...or maybe even optical SATA, sweeet!