Silicon Insider: New Optical Chip from 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.
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