Evanescent Lasers to Speed Up Data Transmission

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) have built the world's first mode-locked silicon evanescent laser. But what is an 'evanescent' laser? It is a step toward 'combining lasers and other key optical components with the existing electronic capabilities in silicon.' In other words, this research work will provide a way to integrate optical and electronic functions on a single chip. As these evanescent lasers can produce stable short pulses of laser light, they will be useful for many optical applications, such as high-speed data transmission or highly accurate optical clocks."

Comments

well,

[Verte]

I remember reading some of the patents they got for this a few months ago. I'm pretty sure we've talked about this before, too. That's not to say I'm any less excited- when we start to see this technology applied to inter-core busses, we'll see latency drop low enough to integrate a bucketload of cores on a single die.