Engineers make leap in optical networks
By John Markoff
http://news.com.com/Engineers+make+leap+in+optical+networks/2100-1008_3-5917145.html
Story last modified Thu Oct 27 06:11:00 PDT 2005
A team of Stanford University electrical engineers has discovered how to
switch a beam of laser light on and off up to 100 billion times a second
with materials that are widely used in the semiconductor industry.
The group used a standard chipmaking process to design a central component
of optical networking gear that is potentially more than 10 times as fast
as the highest-performance commercial products available today.
The team reported its discovery in the current issue of the magazine Nature
and announced it Wednesday. Such an advance could accelerate the decline in
the cost of optical networking and transform computers by making it
possible to interconnect computer chips at extremely high data rates.
The communications industry now uses costly equipment to transmit data over
optical fibers at up to 10 billion bits a second. Researchers, however, are
already experimenting with optically linked computers in which components
may be located on different sides of the globe. Cheap optical switches
would also make it possible to create data superhighways inside computers
and reorganize them for better performance.
"The vision here is that, with the much stronger physics, we can imagine
large numbers--hundreds or even thousands--of optical connections off of
chips," said David Miller, director of the Solid State and Photonics
Laboratory at Stanford University. "Those large numbers could get rid of
the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are
one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not
really been going up much in recent years."
The device reported by the team, called a modulator or solid-state shutter,
could also have a powerful effect on the telecommunications industry, which
is already being transformed by the falling cost of optical fiber networks.
Constructed from silicon and germanium, the device alternately blocks and
transmits light from a separate continuous-wave laser beam, making it
possible to split the beam into a stream of ones and zeros.
The effect, known as a quantum-confined Stark effect, had been demonstrated
before but had not been expected in germanium, a material that is
compatible with the industry's silicon-based manufacturing technologies.
"What we achieved is somewhat surprising," said James Harris, a Stanford
University electrical-engineering professor who is a member of the research
group. "No one thought it would work."
The research project was supported by Intel and the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at the Pentagon. Intel has been intensely
interested in producing optical communications components with standard
chipmaking tools, for both networking and computer communications
applications. Ted Kamins, a quantum materials specialist at Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories, also contributed to the research effort.
"They've made a big leap," said Mario Paniccia, director of the Intel
Photonics Technology Laboratory. He acknowledged, however, that there is a
significant gap between research results and commercial availability of
devices based on those results.
Several industry executives said the advance is significant because it
means that optical data networks are now on the same Moore's Law curve of
increasing performance and falling cost that has driven the computer
industry for the last four decades.
In 1965, Intel's co-founder, Gordon Moore, noted that the number of
transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip was doubling at regular
intervals. The semiconductor industry has held to that rate of change since
then, giving rise to the modern era of microelectronics that has
transformed the global economy.
Now that rate of change could be directing the future of the
telecommunications industry. Computer and communications industry
executives say they believe that advancements in inexpensive optical
networks will transform the computer industry and other major industries as
diverse as the financial marketplace and Hollywood.
Entire contents, Copyright © 2005 The New York Times. All rights reserved.
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