Intel Announces Lasers On a Chip

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 . . .

[base3 (539820)]

. . . to be announced shortly.

Re:Shark implants . . .

[kabz (770151)]

Let's hope they don't try this method with LCD displays ...

Man 1: "Crank the brightness up on the laptop."
Man 2: "Arrrggghhh, my eyes !!!!!"

Tron

[pythiane (1003082)]

And Tron is yet another step closer to fact.

About time

[dorpus (636554)]

They've been trying to build optical computing chips since the 1980s. I did a summer internship in Japan in 1990, when they were making custom batches of exotic rare-earth crystals for fiber-optic relay stations.

Re:About time

[KDR_11k (778916)]

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 and wires can't.

May I introduce you to a groundbreaking new technology called "glass fibres"?

There goes the industry . . .

[dmatos (232892)]

For blue LEDs used by case modders. Why bother when the chips are flashing all by themselves.

Switching

[Zebadias (861722)]

I think this will be of more use to optical switching - if you have the ability to switch and route on your fibernetwork without changing from optical to electrical and back again you can switch much faster and more efficiently.

Re:Switching

[Relic of the Future (118669)]

No, this isn't optical switching. Laser light still comes in, gets converted to electrons, calculations are performed, and then more laser light is generated and sent out.

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.

Go Intel!

[Cybert4 (994278)]

Great company. Real solid and with great integrity. I'm sure they'll put lasers to great use. Yes, x86 is horrible, but that too will pass.

What does this do to the FSB-multiplier setup?

[ZachPruckowski (918562)]

Obviously this boosts bandwidth and cuts latency (like mad), but doesn't this kill the current FSB speed and multiplier method? I mean, your clock speed is FSB clock x multiplier, so what happens if you replace the FSB with a laser?

Re:What does this do to the FSB-multiplier setup?

[dgatwood (11270)]

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.

A huge advance?

[Coppit (2441)]

From what I recall in physics class electrons travel at 2/3 c. So at best this means that memories and chips can be 50% further apart, or that clocks can go 50% faster. Or is there more to this?

Re:A huge advance?

[MightyYar (622222)]

I'm in the industry, but this isn't my specialty. From what I remember, the speed of the electrons isn't why this is important. There are electromagnetic effects that limit the speed of communications... things like crosstalk. The little balls, wires, or deposited metal that they currently use to make the interconnections are like tiny little antennas. The interconnections are also a pain in general, no matter what technology is used, because of things like thermal mismatches and encapsulation problems. From a packaging standpoint, this would solve many problems, and probably create even more - alignment, anyone?

Bosons vs. Fermions

[monopole (44023)]

Electronic signals travel pretty damn close to c. The problem is that electrons are fermions and as a result are antisocial by the Pauli exclusion principle no more than 2 in each location. Charge makes this even worse. On the other hand photons are boson and they like to hang out in the same location. As a result electrons are handy when you want bits to interact (logic gates, memory) while photons are handy when you want bits to pass through each other (communications etc.). The advantage of using photons is that you can make connections without EMI or other cross talk problems. In addition there is some very nifty quantum computing you can do with such systems (the topic of my dissertation).

Re:A huge advance?

[DarthTaco (687646)]

Electrons do travel slow. I don't know if its 6 meters per second, but that's the right order of magnitude.

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.

Re:A huge advance?

[wass (72082)]

But the signal is still transmitted by the electrons, not some EM pulse.

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.

Electronics and the electromotive force

[DeadCatX2 (950953)]

You are correct, the average velocity of a given electron in a DC circuit is pitifully slow. I think it takes an hour for an electron to make it from the battery through the starter switch and into the solenoid. This is because the electron starts to take off, runs into an atom and bounces backwards like a bouncy ball, hits something else and bounces forward, etc. Hence why we discuss the average velocity. You might also want to look up drift velocity [wikipedia.org].

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.

Safe?

[pafmax (462211)]

The future of IM:
- Hey look at what I'm sending you!
- ARGH! MY EYES!!!

Seriously, are these lasers safe?

Re:Safe?

[reverseengineer (580922)]

The future of IM:
- Hey look at what I'm sending you!
- ARGH! MY EYES!!!

That's pretty much what IM is like now.

I just saw this.

[Steve525 (236741)]

I was at a conference last weel (http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/leos/LE OSCONF/GFP2006/index.html [ieee.org]) were this was presented by John Bowers. As they explain briefly in the article, they are bonding InP to Silicon wafers. The silicon provides the waveguiding, and enough of the mode is in the InP to give them gain. They achieved an optically pumped laser, and were still working on an electrically pumped one. I wonder if this announcement will mean that they achieved electrically pumped lasing.

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.

This is going to take awhile

[baggins2001 (697667)]

I be it will take at least 5 to 10 years to see this on a standard desktop/server system.
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.

I have questions about the usefulness of this

[smellsofbikes (890263)]

1. Why lasers? Why not just light? At the distances they're talking, does coherence and phase matter? Incoherent light is just as fast, and if you're shooting it into waveguides and it's coming out the other end, as long as you're not multiplexing data on a given waveguide what advantage does this give? (I honestly don't know: maybe there's a great reason.)

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

[Fordiman (689627)]

"as long as you're not multiplexing data on a given waveguide what advantage does this give?"

The ability to multiplex data on any given waveguide (ie: boost bandwidth per lead)

Re:The computer science effect.

[Apocalypse111 (597674)]

Enough with the sharks.

You're right of course. We can't get the sharks anyways. We do, however, have some ill-tempered sea-bass...

Re:Wow!

[treeves (963993)]

No. Not like that. That uses compound semiconductors like GaAs (gallium arsenide).
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]