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IBM Slows the Speed of Light
dptalia writes "According to an article on ZDNet, IBM has come up with a way to slow light to 1/300 of its normal speed. While this has been done in laboratories before, IBM has found out how to do this using standard materials, which opens the possibility of mass production. This means that the dream of having optical based CPUs may be closer than previously thought." From the article: "When the optical conversion might start to occur is a matter of speculation. Luxtera has said it will start to commercially produce products in 2007. The computer industry, however, tends to move slowly when it comes to major overhauls of computer architecture. Several components will have to be developed before photons can replace electrons inside computers. A paper providing details on the chip will run in Nature on Wednesday."
Joke aside, it's always been a variable. It changes depending on the medium it's traveling through. 'c' is just the speed of light in a vacuum.
It allows you to build chips using light, at speeds for which we can reasonably design things, and interface them with things at small fractions of C. The benefit to the optical chip is power and heat, which means you can pack more chips in, which means you can make a faster computer.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Every Pratchett fan knows that light slows down if you apply a strong Magical field...
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it's wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
- Reaper Man
The higher the dispersion, the lower the practical bandwidth of the device.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Step 1: Pass light through any medium which is not a complete vacuum.
That's it!