Silicon Insider: Intel
Feb. 26 -- Is it a tantalizing glimpse of our technical future, or merely just a trick of the light?
In case you missed it, Intel earlier this month announced (and published in the scientific journal Nature) that it had developed a way to make silicon circuits switch beams of light the same way they currently switch streams of electrons.
Then, at the company's annual developers forum, Intel was to use a prototype device — a high-speed silicon optical modulator capable of two billion bits per second — to show just what this new technology is capable of doing: transmit a movie in high-definition television, in real time, over a five-mile coil of fiberoptic cable.
The news has the electronics world (and its bloggers) buzzing. If Intel really has what it says it has — and more important, can build it in volume — then we may be looking at the digital equivalent of a Unified Field Theory.
If Intel is right, then the long-standing dream of merging the two great worlds of tech — computing and telecommunications — may have begun ….and better yet, this amazing new hybrid technology may be governed by Moore's Law.
To understand what all of this means, we need some history.
Digital Reality, Telecom Innovation
The digital world is a hybrid itself, the product of its own great merger of two technologies: digital computers, with its roots in giant computational machines like Eniac, and semiconductor integrated circuits, which arose out of solid-state physics, transistors and planar silicon transistors.
This merger began in the mid-1960s with the first semiconductor-based minicomputers, found its heart with the invention of the microprocessor at the beginning of the 1970s, and fulfilled its destiny with the rise of the personal computer at the end of the decade.
It was at that moment when Moore's Law, with its relentless doubling of performance every two years, began to set the pace for the entire digital world — and ultimately for the society around it.
Telecommunications followed a similar, if shallower trajectory.
A century older than computing, telcom achieved a very high level of sophistication and usage in the old electromechanical world even before modern electronics appeared.
Not surprisingly, the legacy problem of old switching technology managed by big old companies retarded the development of telcom (despite the fact that it was, at the same time through Bell Labs, driving much of the innovation in the digital world).
What innovations did occur in this sector were largely borrowings from the digital world: Electronic switching and routing, digital transmission, the Internet, etc.
But there were two exceptions: wireless and fiber optic.
The Future is Photonics
For now, let's focus on fiber.
The power of fiber optics was that it was the one area of telecommunications that offered the same kind of explosive, grains-of-rice-on-the-chessboard growth curve as semiconductors. The unit of measurement in fiber is bandwidth, and, thanks to a series of brilliant innovations, fiber optic bandwidth has actually improved over the past decade at a pace even faster than Moore's Law.
Fiber also offered something else: its medium wasn't electrons, with all their problems with resistance, heat and noise, but photons. The electronics world could only look on in envy. Imagine, they told themselves, a world where you don't have to worry about cooling fans and stray static charges and weird quantum effects.
But there was one big problem with photons: Sure, thanks to fiber, it was easy to move them from place to place … but once you got them there what could you do with them? Well, read them, translate the message into electrons, then process the information in a silicon processor.
Thus the Great Divide.
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