Slashdot Mirror
Engineers Report Breakthrough in Laser Beam Tech
petralynn writes to tell us the New York Times is reporting that Stanford engineers have discovered a method to modulate a beam of laser light up to 100 billion times a second. The new technology apparently uses materials that are already in wide use throughout the semiconductor industry. From the article: "The vision here is that, with the much stronger physics, we can imagine large numbers - hundreds or even thousands - of optical connections off of chips," said David A.B. Miller, director of the Solid State and Photonics Laboratory at Stanford University. "Those large numbers could get rid of the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years."
Ok, I usually don't gribe about spelling mistakes, but STANDFORD?!!! First we get Taco's rant about his online gaming debacles and now we get this...Slashdot has stooped to new lows today.
A week or so ago, I mentioned decommissioning analog & digital TV broadcast spectrum to use for ore wireless data. I mentioned how fiber was just on serendipidous discovery away from massive data rates. I was shunned as "everyone knows" there are limits to light.
While this may not be THE discovery I was alluding to, it proves that the door surely isn't closed.
While science can find use in this discovery, I'm more interested in profitable consumer uses. What are the possibilities there?