Slashdot Mirror
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.
And Tron is yet another step closer to fact.
Log Buffer
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.
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
The future of IM:
- Hey look at what I'm sending you!
- ARGH! MY EYES!!!
Seriously, are these lasers safe?
Electrons do travel slow. I don't know if its 6 meters per second, but that's the right order of magnitude.
But the signal is still transmitted by the electrons, not some EM pulse. Most designers try to minimize the EM radiation. Think of it like a tube full of marbles. If you shove a marble in one end, one will immediately pop out the other end... it doesn't matter that it would take a long time for that specific marble to travel to the other side.
Enough with the sharks.
You're right of course. We can't get the sharks anyways. We do, however, have some ill-tempered sea-bass...
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
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.
:(){