The Change Mariner

Intel Announces Photonics Breakthrough

Canada.com:

In an advance that could inexpensively speed up corporate data centres and eventually personal computers, researchers used everyday silicon to build a device that converts data into light beams.

Light-based communications has until now largely been the realm of large telecom companies and long-haul fibre-optic networks because of the expense of the exotic materials required to harness photons, the basic building block of light.

Now, researchers at Intel Corp. say their results with silicon promise to reduce the cost of photonics by introducing a well-known substance that's more readily available.

In the study, published recently in the journal Nature, the Intel researchers reported encoding one billion bits of data per second, 50 times faster than previous silicon experiments. They said they could achieve rates of up to 10 billion bits per second within months.

"This is a significant step toward building optical devices that move data around inside a computer at the speed of light," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief technology officer.

Intel believes the finding could have profound implications for the links between servers in corporate data centres. Eventually, the technology could find its way into personal computers and even consumer electronics.

"It is the kind of breakthrough that ripples across an industry over time, enabling other new devices and applications," Gelsinger said. "It could help make the Internet run faster, build much faster high-performance computers and enable high bandwidth applications like ultra-high-definition displays or vision recognition systems."