Intel chip could enable terabit data transfer

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 19 September 2006 04:25

Your IT - Home IT

The world's first silicon laser chip, announced today by Intel, could enable computers to be built with dramatic performance improvements because of internal optical data pipes replacing slow physical wires.

Researchers from Intel and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) say the breakthrough addresses one of the last major barriers to producing low-cost, high-bandwidth silicon photonics devices for use inside and around future computers and data centres.

“This could bring low-cost, terabit-level optical ‘data pipes’ inside future computers and help make possible a new era of high-performance computing applications," said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab. "While still far from becoming a commercial product, we believe dozens, maybe even hundreds of hybrid silicon lasers could be integrated with other silicon photonic components onto a single silicon chip.”

A laser based on silicon could drive wider use of photonics in computers because the cost can be greatly reduced by using high-volume silicon manufacturing techniques.
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