Intel Boosts Optical Communication Speeds

An anonymous reader writes "Intel has developed a device, the Avalanche Photodetector, that senses light pulses and amplifies output signals for faster data transfer over long distances. Researchers claim this is a big advancement in the field of silicon photonics, in which silicon is used to transfer light pulses for data exchange between chips and devices. APD can detect light at higher frequencies and moves data at rates of 40Gbps, making it more sensitive and quicker than earlier photodetectors, at a tenth the cost."

Comments

Another article here

[boohaha]

There's another article about it here. Interesting snippet: "Earlier this year, Sun received a US$44 million contract from DARPA to boost computing performance by enabling chip communication using lasers over silicon and to reduce power consumption by placing chips close to each other."

Factual corrections

[JumpingBull]

First, APD's have been around for years; their vacuum cousins are called photo-multipliers.

Second, the article states electron pairs; that should be amended to electron-hole pairs. When a photon whacks into a lattice, it ejects an electron, leaving a hole. This absence of an electron can be filled by a nearby electron, so the hole moves, rather like a hole in a crowd.

The important parts (pointed out by other posters, also), are that:

• Intel gets bragging rights for significant technology and fabrication advances
• It just got way cheaper to put high speed communications on a chip or in a system
• Intel is working on optical plumbing (waveguides) for the chip level
• The spin-off company may become another publicly traded company
• The technology used is incremental, and has less risks to implement

In all, life just got more interesting; we just have to wait about five years for this to be in regular production

Re:misleading

[digitalderbs]

The Intel device is something of a hybrid. It uses silicon as an amplifying material, however it also uses a layer of germanium as a light absorption region to allow operating in infrared wavelengths.

Photo multipliers have been around for a while; it would appear that the innovation is a PMT that is sensitive to IR wavelengths.

The article mentions the primary source in Nature Photonics, but it doesn't reference it (!).

Re:misleading

[digitally404]

The real news is that this APD device supports a greater bandwidth (340 GHz) for a silicon photonics based repeater. This helps advance the steps further towards optical computing, with silicon as the mediator for our current electronic devices.