Intel Announces Lasers On a Chip 244
wonkavader writes, "The New York Times reports that 'Researchers plan to announce on Monday that they have created a silicon-based chip that can produce laser beams. The advance will make it possible to use laser light rather than wires to send data between chips, removing the most significant bottleneck in computer design.' The work is from Intel and the University of California, Santa Barbara. This suggests breakthroughs in both computing performance and networking." From the article: "The breakthrough was achieved by bonding a layer of light-emitting indium phosphide onto the surface of a standard silicon chip etched with special channels that act as light-wave guides. The resulting sandwich has the potential to create on a computer chip hundreds and possibly thousands of tiny, bright lasers that can be switched on and off billions of times a second." Further details in the Intel press release.
Shark implants . . . (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Shark implants . . . (Score:4, Funny)
Man 1: "Crank the brightness up on the laptop."
Man 2: "Arrrggghhh, my eyes !!!!!"
Tron (Score:5, Funny)
About time (Score:5, Interesting)
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I was going to say the same. They keep trumpeting their chip laser technology on every keynote I've seen for years now.
There's a flaw with using lasers for integral schemes: they go in a straight direction, wires can "steer" and form more complex patterns. Of course lasers can also cross each other
Re:About time (Score:5, Funny)
May I introduce you to a groundbreaking new technology called "glass fibres"?
There goes the industry . . . (Score:5, Funny)
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* Blinky new CPU: $1000.00
* Transparent heatsink made of Aluminum oxynitride: $5,000.00
* Being the 1337357 h4x0r in the whole basement: Priceless.
Switching (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Switching (Score:5, Informative)
What this does is make it much simpiler (and CHEAPER) to make the laser light, to the point where it's worth while to have a fiberoptic connection between, say, your CPU and and your vRAM, or between your IDE controller and your RAM, rather than the terribly capacitive and inductive (and therefore SLOW) motherboard trace.
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You mean a photodiode [wikipedia.org]? They can be silicon-based; I don't know how that doesn't qualify as solid state. Look at the materials commonly used to make them. You'll notice that (silicon notwithstanding) these are the same things commonly used to dope silicon in ICs.
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Go Intel! (Score:3, Funny)
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Not as long as MSFT is making the default OS. Heck MSFT can't even get away from the now ~25 year old tech of BIOS and floppy disks. Vista will finally kill the need floppy's but MSFT refuses to fully support EFI. You have to use a bios compatiblity module to boot vista.
Yet Apple is on their second major system architecture change in 15 years. and Linux. Well linux runs on nearly anythng.
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I installed XP on a RAID on my home machine that doesn't have a floppy drive. I just booted from CD.
Certainly the rack mount/blade servers the IT guys down the hall don't waste sppace for a floppy drive, and they certainly do all the "interesting" stuff with hard drives.
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User criticized x86. Laser firing on user Cyber14 in 4...3...2...
What does this do to the FSB-multiplier setup? (Score:4, Interesting)
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If I'm reading it right, most of the control could be handled by the same mechanisms, it's just that different signal senders and recievers will need to be used.
And, I thought lasers didn't offer significantly lower latency, only better bandwidth?
Re:What does this do to the FSB-multiplier setup? (Score:4, Informative)
The speed of electrical propagation in copper (~200,000 km/sec) is about 2/3rds the speed of light in a vacuum (~299,792 km/sec). Think of it as having about 2/3rds the latency of copper and you'll be about right, assuming the light goes through open air.
Now if you mean light through an optical cable, it's about as slow as a signal through copper, so there's no real gain.
The real benefit here is short interconnects without any medium in-between. CPU vendors have done this within chips by putting edge contacts on cores so that they can tessellate the cores and have them connected together. With optical edge connects, the failure rate will be lower because the contacts won't corrode and don't have to be soldered.
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The data still has to be transmitted and still has to get back.
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To reap the benefits of optics outside the package you'd need an optical socket and a radically new kind of mobo design.
Give it 20 more years...
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A huge advance? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:A huge advance? (Score:5, Informative)
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That sounds better than what I said :)
I'm in the chip assembly equipment end, and the main problem that I think they will have is lining up the chip with the substrate so that the lasers point at the detectors. The additional challenge will be keeping them lined up, since the substrate usually has a different coefficient of thermal expansion (COE) than the chip. Even if the COE matches, the temperature may not. Presumably, they will have to wire up the power to these chips, perhaps using a wire bonder, an
Power (Score:3, Informative)
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Bosons vs. Fermions (Score:5, Informative)
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However, a changing voltage signal will propagate at speeds of order c (smaller than c, of course). The 'wires' ror traces unning on the microprocessor are basically transmission lines, so you're really transmitting electromagnetic signals. This is just like standard textbook transm
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The simplest way to explain this is to note that a wire is an inductor - and at high frequencies this matters. What is more, a 1Ghz digital signal needs bandwidth much larger than 1Ghz - or the edges of ones and zeros get distorted too much. If CPUs used analog signals inside to transmit information between chips (
Re:A huge advance? (Score:5, Informative)
But the signal is still transmitted by the electrons, not some EM pulse. Most designers try to minimize the EM radiation. Think of it like a tube full of marbles. If you shove a marble in one end, one will immediately pop out the other end... it doesn't matter that it would take a long time for that specific marble to travel to the other side.
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The signal is not transmitted by electrons--if it was like a tube of marbles, it would take minutes to turn on a light switch and seconds to get a single byte off of an external hard drive, which is obviously not the case. The signal is transmitted by voltage differences, which do change and propagate at a rate very close to c.
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Cheers,
-l
Re:A huge advance? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes and no, the signal is actually photonic in nature, it's an electromagnetic oscillation travelling down the wire, which itself is nothing more than a simple waveguide. So you're sending photons down the wire, photons being the 'particles' exchanged by two electrons that exhibit Coulomb repulsion.
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It's a complicated problem because they don't really 'drift' per se, but are really scattered around, with a preference to go along the electric field (actually, against it since they're negatively charged). The electrons themselves actual travel travel fairly quickly, but they're constantly scat
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That's how an 'EM Pulse' works. You pop the marble in one side, and the disturbance in the other marbles causes a marble to pop out the other.
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I hear the internet is made of tubes. A senator told me that.
~X~
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Electronics and the electromotive force (Score:5, Informative)
However, the electromotive force [wikipedia.org] (emf, colloquially referred to as voltage) propagates as an electromagnetic wave. The speed that it propagates at is dependent on the permittivity [wikipedia.org] of the material it is propagating through.
IIRC from my VLSI class, if you take into account the permittivity of silicon, electrical signals (emf; voltage) propagate at approximately 2/3rds of the speed of light.
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Example, you just said you were dumb. Each of those letters *was* in your post...
Please read the rest before commenting on something that has been shown to be incorrect. Don't just read parts.
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Safe? (Score:5, Funny)
- Hey look at what I'm sending you!
- ARGH! MY EYES!!!
Seriously, are these lasers safe?
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Re:Safe? (Score:5, Funny)
That's pretty much what IM is like now.
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New Techniques... (Score:3, Interesting)
Could this, with another 10 years of evolution and the advancement of color coordination and multi-colored laser chips, provide incredibly high contrast and accurate projections? This is like DLP projectors on steroids. They don't simply reflect light one pixel at at time, they actually create the laser one pixel at a time.
I also was wondering what the 3D applications would be like. Perhaps an R2D2 unit fitted with one of these would have a much sharper and sexier image of the princess asking for OB1's help.
Also, how about a laser weapon targeting system that can lase 100 targets at once for all the bomblets?
Great things are going on in my mind.
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Great ideas huh? (Score:2)
Also, how about a laser weapon targeting system that can lase 100 targets at once for all the bomblets?
Great things are going on in my mind.
Okay dude, I was with you when you talked about a sexier picture of Leia, but the moment you talked about weapons, I could no longer support the idea that your mind was great.
The computer science effect. (Score:2, Insightful)
In other news... (Score:2)
Re:The computer science effect. (Score:5, Funny)
You're right of course. We can't get the sharks anyways. We do, however, have some ill-tempered sea-bass...
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*checks post anonymously to avoid ruining my excellent karma.*
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I don't fear Sea Bass, for I have drawn around myself a circle in the sand.
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My sister was bitten by a sea-bass once...
You are correct (Score:2)
Laser Displays? (Score:2)
I just saw this. (Score:5, Informative)
It's good work, but I'm not sure if the bonding process will ever be suitable for monolithography integrated CMOS and photonics. I was more impressed by the work done in Huffaker's lab (http://www.chtm.unm.edu/huffaker/index.html [unm.edu]) where they are working on growing III-V materials directly on silicon. However, the work by Bowers is more mature and will lead to devices sooner.
What the fuck (Score:2)
This is going to take awhile (Score:4, Interesting)
My biggest concern is reliability. How many people are running SANS with redundant Fiber optic connections. Why? because the lasers fail. Could you imagine if you had a motherboard built with multiple lasers for on board communication. Yeah it would be fast, right up until the time one of those lasers failed.
InP lasers on silicon is new technology and is quite a ways from being producible in a mass market chip. Manufacturers have enough trouble getting gates, isolation, contacts for silicon devices reproduced. Now tell them to create a step where they put a laser in there and I bet it will take them 2-3 years design and 3 years to get a manufacturing process. (Can anyone say copper level metal?).
Hopefully this isn't something that completely patentable, because this is where the consumers would benefit from competition.
From a manufacturing perspective, I would rather be stuck trying to implement TaO gates.
What this breakthrough really means (Score:3, Insightful)
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Good points you have there, and for further probing, here is an excellent article on the topic from the always excellent IEEE Spectrum:
The Silicon Solution [ieee.org]Now if we could only... (Score:2)
Well, why not? (Score:2)
Power anyone? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm interrested in how they manage to keep the power consumption reasonable. Till then, I call hype!
I Can't Wait! (Score:2)
First, bubble memory, then optical processors, then...
Yay!!
MjM
I have questions about the usefulness of this (Score:4, Insightful)
2. They're still bonding indium phosphide onto an existing chip. When they can use photolithography to build a billion lasers on the chip itself, rather than having to glue separate lasers onto a chip, that'll be really impressive. That's why so much effort is being focussed (pardon me) on developing silicon lasers [brown.edu] rather than exotics attached to silicon.
Re:I have questions about the usefulness of this (Score:5, Insightful)
The ability to multiplex data on any given waveguide (ie: boost bandwidth per lead)
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It seems to me that the whole point of optic computing is to replace the whole chip with waveguides and do all the computing with light: no crosstalk, no capacitance. What Intel has done is keep the chip, but swap out the bondwires with optical ones. That's pretty cool but it's not obvious to me that it beats current interconnects. Yeah, it's neat that they can multiplex, but
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You're posting to **Slashdot**. You gotta know the answer to this one.
Old hat? (Score:2)
Isn't this just what laser LED's are? They've been around for years now.
My eyes must be going... (Score:2)
Dust (Score:2)
Also, could the removal of electronic pathways in place of lasers result in a much cooler running system, since there won't be heat generated by electronic resistance?
it's like.. Snakes on a Plane.. (Score:2)
sri
Vaporware (Score:2)
Wasnt this done 30 years ago? (Score:2)
Time-To-Market law? (Score:2)
Re:All posters referencing Austin Powers owe me $1 (Score:2)
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Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
Intel is now making lasers with silicon substrate.
However, if your point is that is isn't quite new, OK. Intel announced this originally back in February 2005 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raman_laser]
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The old anouncement uses Raman gain- where you throw shitloads of optical power down a waveguide (or fiber) at one wavelength and you get new light at another. For this to happen, you only need a silicon waveguide (and perhaps some electronics to pull out carriers that are formed).
In this new case they are bonding InP (a III-V material like GaAs) to silicon. This hybrid device allows the light to be guided mostly by the silicon, but the gain is occuring in the InP in
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Don't bother - just turn up the power !