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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."
"Intel has developed a device, the Avalanche Photodetector" is a bit of an overstatement, since these have been in use as nuclear and particle physics detectors for almost 30 years now...
I'd say the real news here is "tenth of the price". The 4 times the previous speed improvement is nice, mind you, but it's the price drop that means it's likely to find it's way to consumer-level stuff eventually.
Also interesting is DARPA being involved (again) which seems to happen more often than our patenting overlords would like us to know.
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."
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:
In all, life just got more interesting; we just have to wait about five years for this to be in regular production
This is progress?
I would like to take the time to point out that avalanche photodetectors are exceptionally old news, but most people (including subby) don't seem to realize this. The original incarnation was called a photomultiplier tube (yes, vacuum tube technology). For decades we've used these things in industry and primary research. For example, a Geiger counter is basically a photomultiplier hooked up to a voltage source and a speaker.
That said, I'm very curious to know the exact academic/industry/government research relationship which most likely gave rise to Intel's advances. It'd be a good way to wake people up to the fact that truly risky innovation simply does not happen in private industry. There's no reason to take on that risk to stable profits.
Sure, some will argue Intel needs to innovate or die, but I'm relatively sure all of this technology is an outgrowth of high-sensitivity avalanche photodetectors used in conjunction with scintillators to detect very rare particle events like neutron-boson interactions. (Hint: Extremely non-profit primary research funded entirely by collaborative efforts which used to be largely funded by U.S. government grants but which have slowly but surely shifted to European and Asian government grants.)
Long story short, when we abandoned the SSC and the scaled down European project (LHC) took its place we lost primary research opportunities which, due to the nature of particle detection technology, could probably have helped American companies. The advancement of avalanche photodetector technology is directly related to this kind of high-cost, government funded primary research.
On a personal note, I left physics in large part because I would have been an experimentalist and for the past decade or more I saw that such a life would be half making due with shoddy equipment and half writing grant proposals. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Then I read about the LHC and feel sad that EVERYONE was thinking small the past 20 years or so.