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Intel Researchers Demonstrate 40Gbps Optical Chips
scott3778 writes "Intel Researchers announced they have successfully demonstrated a 40Gbps optical chip, an accomplishment the company says will yield cheaper photonic integrated circuits. 'chip makers have shown a keen interest in photonic integrated circuits (PICs) over the past few years because of their ability to provide a cost-effective solution for optical communication and future optical interconnects in computing industry. There are obstacles, though: One of the key components needed for silicon PICs is the very high-speed silicon optical modulator, which is used to encode data on optical beam.'"
* Sam's Laser FAQ
Catalyzing development. (hopefully)
- Does anybody have links or papers re: manufacturing of fiber optics or very small optical beams? Would be great to have.
Now that's something Sigbritt Löthberg (http://slashdot.org/articles/07/07/12/1236231.sht ml) needs to install on her computer to take advantage of her 40GBps internet link!
Yes, but there are only so many initialisms available, they overlap regularly. My favorite one is POS, either "Point of Sale" or "Piece of Shit". I loved calling referring to the cash registers at my last job as POS systems because they were both.
Would spinning one those color wheels they use at the discos at 10,000rpm work?
What?
I mean how the hell am I gonna overclock light?
This is actually the main problem that is solved with this solution. Traditionally, electro-optical conversion was done using discrete components. This consumed a great deal of power and also added the extra restriction that a separate, optical modulator had to be added along with the central electronic chip. It also meant that the electronic chip had to somehow send a very fast electrical signal (and all the attenuation that would occur to it) to the optical module.
The optical IC they came up with isn't optical entirely. The internal logic is still electrical but they've managed to do a silicon-level electro-optical converter and directly send the optical signal out (I'm guessing through a microlens). This isn't likely to make internal logic (the next Pentium...wait they don't use that name anymore) calculate faster, but it'll be interesting to see this used as a RAM interface, for instance, or for multi-processor interconnect.
ISTR that if we assume that most TLAs consist of the 26 ASCII letters (case-insensitive), and therefore there are 26^3=17576 TLAs. However, according to
http://www.internetworldstats.com/blog.htm, there are currently 1,173,109,925 internet users. Clearly, there are not enough TLAs to go around, and so I propose TLAv2. TLAv2 will increase the number of available TLAs to 8031810176; this is almost seven times the number of people currently using the internet!
These fancy new seven-letter three letter acronyms (FNSLTLAs) also appeal because those using them will be able to spell out such phrases as DEDBEEF and PATRIOT (whoops, I think that one may already be taken). This, in addition to the easy availability of addresses (IANA will be selling a 26-address block, for example BOOBIE{A through Z}, for less than the price of a single TLAv1 address)