7/3/2008

Intel has created a silicon photonic chip that crunches a terabyte of data without breaking a sweat.

Other companies are now also exploring the capabilities of silicon for photonics. IBM and Sun Microsystems have active research groups, and a startup called Luxtera has already made advances in silicon-based optical interconnects for data centers. At Intel, however, the pieces are coming together to make a single chip that could process a terabit of data in the space of a thumbnail. This chip and its accompanying electronics could replace racks full of expensive hardware that currently occupy rooms at Internet switching stations. And if all goes well, optical devices made of silicon could allow engineers to replace copper wiring in computers with beams of data-encoded light.

“Intel has pioneered a lot of high-speed silicon-photonics devices, and it’s certainly one of the premier research groups,” says Jack Cunningham, co-principle investigator of Sun Microsystems’ proximity interconnect project, which focuses on low-power interchip communication for high-performance computers. Cunningham says that the Intel test chip is another important step in the evolution of silicon photonics. “It’s the right direction in the sense that high-bandwidth optical signaling on silicon chips is very important,” he says.

Source