Optoelectronics Breakthrough
Posted: Fri Dec 07, 2007 8:09 am
IBM's had quite a few breakthroughs in this area. I wonder how long it'll be before they have a full computer running on photons (light) instead of electrons.
Linky
Linky
--AlanArticle wrote:IBM Announces Optoelectronics Breakthrough
By Mark Hachman
IBM said Thursday that it has designed an significantly smaller electro-optic modulator that can translate electric pulses into light.
The device, known as a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator, is a key component in optoelectronics. The device translates electrical energy into light -- transforming electrons into photons. IBM said that its modulator is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than previously-demonstrated modulators, but did not say how it was manufactured.
That's an important step toward using light as a means of communication, rather than electricity. Although the throughput of both electrons and photons is somewhat dependent on the conductive medium, the advantage to using photons to transmit information is that the technology is much faster than using electrons. Electricity also generates waste heat as a function of resistance, which must be cooled.
IBM did not say how much power was needed to generate the photons, however. The modulator is connected to a laser beam, and the modulator opens a "shutter" at precise intervals to encode the information. All told, IBM estimated that "using light instead of wires to send information between the cores can be 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires."
"Work is underway within IBM and in the industry to pack many more computing cores on a single chip, but today's on-chip communications technology would overheat and be far too slow to handle that increase in workload," said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science and Technology, IBM Research. "What we have done is a significant step toward building a vastly smaller and more power-efficient way to connect those cores, in a way that nobody has done before."
