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Intel Announces Lasers On a Chip
wonkavader writes, "The New York Times reports that 'Researchers plan to announce on Monday that they have created a silicon-based chip that can produce laser beams. The advance will make it possible to use laser light rather than wires to send data between chips, removing the most significant bottleneck in computer design.' The work is from Intel and the University of California, Santa Barbara. This suggests breakthroughs in both computing performance and networking." From the article: "The breakthrough was achieved by bonding a layer of light-emitting indium phosphide onto the surface of a standard silicon chip etched with special channels that act as light-wave guides. The resulting sandwich has the potential to create on a computer chip hundreds and possibly thousands of tiny, bright lasers that can be switched on and off billions of times a second." Further details in the Intel press release.
. . . to be announced shortly.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Why have the sharks not been fitted with laser beams?
And Tron is yet another step closer to fact.
Log Buffer
...that we've got lasers on a mutha-f'ing chip?
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
They've been trying to build optical computing chips since the 1980s. I did a summer internship in Japan in 1990, when they were making custom batches of exotic rare-earth crystals for fiber-optic relay stations.
I'm gonna be rich! w00t!
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
snakes on a chip?
For blue LEDs used by case modders. Why bother when the chips are flashing all by themselves.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
I think this will be of more use to optical switching - if you have the ability to switch and route on your fibernetwork without changing from optical to electrical and back again you can switch much faster and more efficiently.
Great company. Real solid and with great integrity. I'm sure they'll put lasers to great use. Yes, x86 is horrible, but that too will pass.
We got motherfukin lasers on this mutherfukin chip!
Obviously this boosts bandwidth and cuts latency (like mad), but doesn't this kill the current FSB speed and multiplier method? I mean, your clock speed is FSB clock x multiplier, so what happens if you replace the FSB with a laser?
Hence the number of people referencing "SoaP" instead.
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
Quick, file a patent on Austin Powers laser beam shark references!
I am very excited about the potential for advances in the residential fiber market. FIOS is expensive now, but these advances show a lot of promise, and could eventually drive down the cost of such services.
Also interesting is the possibility of optical local area networking - a replacement for gigabit ethernet? These cost and size reductions are important for that to happen.
Very exciting development.
This space intentionally left blank.
A momentus occasion in the annals of humanity. Fa-ricking Layz0rz on a mofoing chip.
the mods may say you posted flamebait, but to me it's a flame that warms my heart. rock on, brother! --chebucto
From what I recall in physics class electrons travel at 2/3 c. So at best this means that memories and chips can be 50% further apart, or that clocks can go 50% faster. Or is there more to this?
The future of IM:
- Hey look at what I'm sending you!
- ARGH! MY EYES!!!
Seriously, are these lasers safe?
Why not muthafuckin' sharks with freakin' lasers on a muthafuckin' chip?
KHAN!!!
This makes me wonder about the future new techniques this could be used for. Never mind the obvious inter-chip communication...how about visual systems?
Could this, with another 10 years of evolution and the advancement of color coordination and multi-colored laser chips, provide incredibly high contrast and accurate projections? This is like DLP projectors on steroids. They don't simply reflect light one pixel at at time, they actually create the laser one pixel at a time.
I also was wondering what the 3D applications would be like. Perhaps an R2D2 unit fitted with one of these would have a much sharper and sexier image of the princess asking for OB1's help.
Also, how about a laser weapon targeting system that can lase 100 targets at once for all the bomblets?
Great things are going on in my mind.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
Put a lot of people who know a bit about computer science (linux, PHP, etc. ) and have them comment on a hard science. They don't even know enough hard physics and math to even rate their own skills. All they can do is joke about it. Enough with the sharks.
I've been reading a lot of Charles Stross lately, and reading news like this inevitably makes me think about the singularity depicted in Accelerando and his other novels.
I cnat wiat for the day wehn hunams will hvae chips inisde tehm taht will make tehm SMARTR, FASTR AND MORE EFFICENT. and i am not talking about potato chips.
PS... I need chips!
..how do we fit these on the sharks?
The count of Montecito just flew the castle. Intel is keeping it around. And they have enough money to do whatever they want with Itanium.
In other news, people don't know everything. Get used to it.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
To me, this sounds like an extremely high-res display device. I wonder how suitable this stuff is for displays anyway? Will the manufacturing process be easier/faster/cheaper than other technologies in use today? Will it open doors for the creation of live 3D holographic displays?
How novel! A laser on a chip ? You mean, like this?
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
This just seems like its going to extend non-Quantam computing capabilities. We will see processing improvements with optical processors/datapipes, maybe 10~ fold increase in efficiency/speed, but what then? This would appear to cut down on a few ns's for gate switching, but is that all we're going to see here?
Next step beyond that seems to be Quantam computing, and if thats the case, how far can optical computing go before its successor is Quantam? Or, are these 2 seperate information issues? Speed vs. Amount ??
We are out there. Give to singinst.org. Check out brainmeta. The singularity is coming.
A disco ball for your computer! Now not just for it! It is it! Next we'll have Bell bottoms where you put the ipod in the rolled up leg of it (Cause we all now unrolled you'd have like a good 3-4 feet of fabric at your feet.), and your ass will vibrate when the song changes!
oogly boogly!
What's with all the redundant and worthless comments about sharks and airplanes? I thought this topic deserved some intelligent conversation... In leiu of this, I would like to ask, what does this mean for the rest of the industry? Are we looking at a situation in which Intel patents the findings and regains control of the processor market(and even the rest of the electronics market for this matter)? On a different note, this is pretty good news for a lot of things: (1)Smaller batteries, because laptops will require less energy to run. (2)less heat (maybe? that's more of a guess). (3)Faster running system (obviously, from the article). (4)Now even your processor can be pimped out - pick your team: red or blue?
these could be fitted onto a shark's head?
Do you have ESP?
where are my sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
Brought to you by Team SPAM! where we believe: "Information in the noise!"
I also was wondering what the 3D applications would be like. Perhaps an R2D2 unit fitted with one of these would have a much sharper and sexier image of the princess asking for OB1's help.
Also, how about a laser weapon targeting system that can lase 100 targets at once for all the bomblets?
Great things are going on in my mind.
Okay dude, I was with you when you talked about a sexier picture of Leia, but the moment you talked about weapons, I could no longer support the idea that your mind was great.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
This is old news; very old news. This technology was in working form in October, 2003: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,61009, 00.html
Caffeine is my anti-drug!
Duranin - A NWN2 Roleplaying Persistent World
From New Scientist:
An enzyme such as glucose oxidase is then attached to one of the two electrodes. When the chip is exposed to blood sugar, this binds with the enzyme making the electrode underneath heavier. The two electrodes then vibrate differently, which an on-chip sensor can easily detect. And comparing its resonance to a stored database provides a quick blood-sugar reading.
If the electrodes are coated with antibodies or DNA instead of enzymes, the chip could also provide early warning of an infection.
The patent application: http://qurl.com/t41zh
-tito
...will start looking for ways to go faster than the speed of light?
Computer runs hot. User air consitioning to cool it down.
Chips melt if not being cooled. User water to cool them down.
MB uses lasers to transfer information. Turn off lights to not intefere.
So, cold, dark, and wet. All we need is a snake to eat the mouse and we'll have the maternal archetype.
Have you read my journal today?
I was at a conference last weel (http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/leos/LE OSCONF/GFP2006/index.html) were this was presented by John Bowers. As they explain briefly in the article, they are bonding InP to Silicon wafers. The silicon provides the waveguiding, and enough of the mode is in the InP to give them gain. They achieved an optically pumped laser, and were still working on an electrically pumped one. I wonder if this announcement will mean that they achieved electrically pumped lasing.
It's good work, but I'm not sure if the bonding process will ever be suitable for monolithography integrated CMOS and photonics. I was more impressed by the work done in Huffaker's lab (http://www.chtm.unm.edu/huffaker/index.html) where they are working on growing III-V materials directly on silicon. However, the work by Bowers is more mature and will lead to devices sooner.
I want more lasers on sharks!!! Are you listening to me Dick Cheney!!!??? (Of course you are) ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
50% of the visible comments today are regurgitated fad material... jeez...
I be it will take at least 5 to 10 years to see this on a standard desktop/server system.
My biggest concern is reliability. How many people are running SANS with redundant Fiber optic connections. Why? because the lasers fail. Could you imagine if you had a motherboard built with multiple lasers for on board communication. Yeah it would be fast, right up until the time one of those lasers failed.
InP lasers on silicon is new technology and is quite a ways from being producible in a mass market chip. Manufacturers have enough trouble getting gates, isolation, contacts for silicon devices reproduced. Now tell them to create a step where they put a laser in there and I bet it will take them 2-3 years design and 3 years to get a manufacturing process. (Can anyone say copper level metal?).
Hopefully this isn't something that completely patentable, because this is where the consumers would benefit from competition.
From a manufacturing perspective, I would rather be stuck trying to implement TaO gates.
He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
"I want those motherf$cking lasers off those motherf$cking chips!"
I better vacuum the dust out of my box...
While this indeed sounds interesting in theoretical application, anyone who's ever worked with computer hardware is aware how much dust/crap accumulates inside a system's case-- Without sealed, clean conduits to facilitate light transfer, I predict such a system would fail in, oh, 3 days of placement. Especially if you have a cat that sheds as much hair as mine does...
You are correct. If only we CS non-engineer types were worthy to comment on anything outside our realm of mastery.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Uh, that's all i got.
That's just stupid, everyone knows future is lasers-equiped sharks... not laser-equiped chips.
By using optical links, this breakthough will solve some of the problems we have today with sending data at high speed across chip to chip busses. The major problem today with sending data at high rates between chips is the losses incurred by travelling across the FR-4 PCB. As the data rates go up, the greater the losses incurred, the more difficult it is to recover the data being sent. Optical interconnects have significantly less losses at high data rates, thus making them a suitable technology for chip to chip communications in the future. This is a breakthrough because now we can integrate exotic optical materials with low cost silicon using standard chip-making equipment. This was something that could not be done in the past.
Another important step would be to incorporate laser detectors to turn that signal back into electrical. Lasers on one side, detectors on the other, and the chips could be chained together. Until then, don't you still need non-solid state detectors?
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
I would like to have fiber connections to each room in my house... that way I could have displays anywhere I liked (and keep the unsightly computer/video game/video equipment out of sight). I wouldn't worry about the form factor of my equipment, just the compactness of my displays and speakers (output devices).
Wireless just doesn't have the bandwidth for driving high-res displays.
Figure out how to mount those chips onto the heads of sharks...
Who cares about sharks?
I want my lasers on Stingrays...
</badtaste>
sig not found. please replace sig.
Optoisolators have used the concept of transmitting and recieving light inside a silicon die for many years. The only difference is that these chips use lasers, and that the chip Intel's proof of concept merely integrates the technology more closely for data transmission as opposed to wires.
Nothing too groundbreaking, just a smart spin on old technology.
I'd go for lasers on a chip. It's got to be better than Snakes on a Plane.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
I just had a course on advanced VLSI design, where the Professor relies on [Kibar, VanBlerkom, Fan, Esener, J Lightwave Techn., vol. 17, p. 546, 1999] to approximate a couple of Watts for optical interconnects. This is clearly not acceptable.
I'm interrested in how they manage to keep the power consumption reasonable. Till then, I call hype!
Res publica non dominetur
Silly mods, first post != redundant.
First, bubble memory, then optical processors, then...
Yay!!
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Sure the chips have lasers, but can we put snakes on them too?
Electronic signals travel pretty damn close to c. The problem is that electrons are fermions and as a result are antisocial by the Pauli exclusion principle no more than 2 in each location. Charge makes this even worse. On the other hand photons are boson and they like to hang out in the same location. As a result electrons are handy when you want bits to interact (logic gates, memory) while photons are handy when you want bits to pass through each other (communications etc.). The advantage of using photons is that you can make connections without EMI or other cross talk problems. In addition there is some very nifty quantum computing you can do with such systems (the topic of my dissertation).
One huge advantage could be an orders-of-magnitude reduction in the current necessary to drive signals off-chip. (It's not mentioned in the article whether these drivers have a power advantage) Off-chip drivers are a significant source of current drain in a chip, and if this technique eliminates the necessity to wiggle the off-chip capacitive loads at high frequencies, then you'll see much lower power. And if each pin on the output bus is drawing less power, you may see larger bus sizes and more bandwidth between chips.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
1. Why lasers? Why not just light? At the distances they're talking, does coherence and phase matter? Incoherent light is just as fast, and if you're shooting it into waveguides and it's coming out the other end, as long as you're not multiplexing data on a given waveguide what advantage does this give? (I honestly don't know: maybe there's a great reason.)
2. They're still bonding indium phosphide onto an existing chip. When they can use photolithography to build a billion lasers on the chip itself, rather than having to glue separate lasers onto a chip, that'll be really impressive. That's why so much effort is being focussed (pardon me) on developing silicon lasers rather than exotics attached to silicon.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
>> Researchers plan to announce on Monday that they have created a silicon-based chip that can produce laser beams.
Isn't this just what laser LED's are? They've been around for years now.
I thought the headline read "Intel Announces Lawyers On a Chip", and I was really scared for a moment. God forbid Intel unleash billions of transistor-powered attorneys on the world!
You are correct, the average velocity of a given electron in a DC circuit is pitifully slow. I think it takes an hour for an electron to make it from the battery through the starter switch and into the solenoid. This is because the electron starts to take off, runs into an atom and bounces backwards like a bouncy ball, hits something else and bounces forward, etc. Hence why we discuss the average velocity. You might also want to look up drift velocity.
However, the electromotive force (emf, colloquially referred to as voltage) propagates as an electromagnetic wave. The speed that it propagates at is dependent on the permittivity of the material it is propagating through.
IIRC from my VLSI class, if you take into account the permittivity of silicon, electrical signals (emf; voltage) propagate at approximately 2/3rds of the speed of light.
:(){
I see this as a BIG advance for the space industry. Optical processors, or at least something close to it helps with the radiation hardening factor. You don't have the latest and greatest Itanium Willamithon Quad Core processor to throw around up there. You have radiation hardened pentium 2 equivelent processors. If we could have a significant boost in processor ability in space we could have much more sophisticated and artificially intelligent probes and machines searching the universe.
their stock jumps a year-so-far best of six cents
i support the right to offend.
Starring Samuel L. Jackson
"I'm a humble person really,
I'm actually much greater than I think I am"
So, will the motherboards on our computers need to be sealed in an air-tight environment to keep out dust? I imagine the beams need to be fairly small in diameter to make this practical.
Also, could the removal of electronic pathways in place of lasers result in a much cooler running system, since there won't be heat generated by electronic resistance?
8==8 Bones 8==8
YMBNH
segmentation fault. core dumped. laser fires randomly at Redmond, Washington.
Intel announces "Motherfuckin Lasers on a Motherfuckin chip"
sri
Vaporware. It doesn't exist yet. It won't be in production for 10 years. It is a non-product and of no consequence at the moment.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Israelia laser processors have been out http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4331 aka enlight. The device is called Enlight and can perform 8000 billion arithmetic operations per second, about 1000 times faster than a standard processor. The beams from 256 lasers are added or multiplied together when shone on a matrix device called a spatial light modulator. The outputs are then read by an array of light detectors. etc etc.
So long & thx for all the sharks...
Slashdot's moderation system is currently inefficient.
Personally, I don't mind some of the jokes. Occasionally they are well-thought out and clever.
Usually, though, it's just noise. I mean, look at the overwhelming OMGSH4RKZ crap going on in these posts.
But occasionally these jokes^Wmemes can be on topic. I don't want them to go away completely, but I will admit they are the reason I apply -2 to all Funny posts.
What I would like to see?
1) The ability to downmod needs to be more limited, as abuse is way too common and telling other mods to "keep an eye out for abuses" prevents them from finding good posts. This will prevent people who go about looking for karma to screw.
2) Funny mods shouldn't affect the score of a comment. This would stop most of the meme shit.
3) Some sort of system to reward people who don't spend all their mod points. This would prevent people from spending their points on posts that are already moderated enough. The reward should be small enough to encourage them not to waste points, but not large enough to encourage hoarding.
:(){
Lasers on a mothafuckin' chip!
And there ain't a got-damn thing you can do about it!
Get these mo'fing lasers off my mo'fing chip!!!
About 20 years ago I remember reading an IEEE publication that talked about doing this very thing, and i dont think it was a prediction as it had pictures.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Has someone bothered to calculate how long it takes to go from press release to Best Buy for new technologies in different areas?
Education is the silver bullet.
They want their lasers back! ~CYD
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
I believe a family friend (employed by Intel) is part of team that works on chip-based lasers. Interestingly enough, the article (I know, reading it is against Slashdot rules) didn't say much about the advantages this could have in heat reduction, which is what the family friend (hopefully not against any NDA) said this would be really useful in as Intel strives to win mindshare from AMD.
Anyways, maybe this will stop future computers from being secondary radiators in the winter.
Cogito, ergo sum, fosho!
why people should be proficent at the game 'Marble Madness' to move those marbles from start to finish faster :)
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
Mutha f*ckin' LASERS on a CHIP
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
I'm gonna be richer!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Who in the world moderated my post redundant?
There were at least 3 ideas presented in it that I did not read previously in the discussion.
We need to tighten up the moderator system, this is stupid. Perhaps we need to give posting points instead of moderator points. People can only post 3 or 4 times per week. Perhaps it will clear out the juvenile morons that post simply to post.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
We have reached an informational threshold which can only be crossed by harnessing the speed of light directly. The quickest computations require the fastest possible particles moving along the shortest paths. Since the capability now exists to take our information directly from photons travelling molecular distances, the final act of the information revolution will soon be upon us.
Lasers on a motherfuckin' chip.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Help me out here. 1990's deja vu?
how many women will it take to change one of these light bulbs?
i couldn't help myself! (moderation will go one way or anouther depending on the sex of slashdot)
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy snappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
Why, yes! I AM new here.
The sequel: Lasers on a chip
Jesus Saves
Almost everyone on this thread seems to be missing a huge implication. This advancement will finally give us one type of cable to use for everything (except power).
What is my reasoning? Simple: Everything electronic that uses cables must currently have complex, expensive circuitry and jacks to interface with those cables. If you can pull an optical signal off a piece of silicon, the cost of producing a product that uses cables can be dropped significantly by just runing a fibre from an SPDIF type jack to your silicon. It simplifies everything inside and out of a piece of electronics (not in the chip, but out of the chip, between chips and between actual products such as TVs, Cable Boxes, Computers, LANs, WANs, etc...)
So while this is certainly useful for increasing bus speeds and simplifying motherboard designs, it's more profound promise may actually be to revolutionize how we connect pieces of electronic equipment together. Optical LANs, optical connectors to monitors, optical firewire or USB, etc..
The cost savings and simplifications of optical interconnects could revolutionize the electronics industry. But for most of us, the greatest advantage will be that we can throw away all 2932 custom cables we have and just use fibre for everything.
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