Intel Says Chip Speed Breakthrough Will Alter Cyberworld

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Intel Says Chip Speed Breakthrough Will Alter Cyberworld

February 11, 2004
 By JOHN MARKOFF





SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 11 - Intel scientists say that they
have made silicon chips that can switch light like
electricity, blurring the line between computing and
communications and presenting a vision of the digital
future that will allow computers themselves to span cities
or even the entire globe.

The invention demonstrates for the first time, Intel
researchers said, that ultrahigh-speed fiberoptic equipment
can be produced at personal computer industry prices. As
the costs of communicating between computers and chips
falls, the barrier to building fundamentally new kinds of
computers not limited by physical distance should become a
reality, experts said.

The advance, described in a paper to be published on
Thursday in the scientific journal Nature, also suggests
that Intel, as the world's largest chipmaker, may be able
to develop the technology to move into new
telecommunications markets.

It will free computer designers to think about the systems
they create in new ways, making it possible to conceive of
machines that are not located in a single physical place,
according to scientists and industry executives. It will
also make possible a new class of computing applications
based on the possibility of transmitting high-definition
video and images hundreds or even thousands of times faster
than possible on today's Internet.

"Before, there were two worlds - computing and
communications," said Alan Huang, a former Bell Labs
physicist, who has founded the Terabit Corporation, an
optical networking company in Menlo Park, Calif. "Now they
will be the same and we will have powerful computers
everywhere."

One potential application, he said, would be an interactive
digital television system allowing viewers to watch a
sporting event from multiple angles, moving the point of
view at will while the game is being played. With only a
limited number of digital cameras, it might be possible to
synthesize a virtual moveable seat any place in the
stadium. Such a feature exists currently in video games,
but it is far beyond the capacity of today's digital
television transmission systems.

Intel said the technical advance, in which the researchers
use a component made from pure silicon to send data at
speeds as much as 50 times faster than the previous
switching record, is the first step toward building
low-cost networks that will move data seamlessly between
computers and within large computer systems.

"This opens up whole new areas for Intel," said Mario
Paniccia, a an Intel physicist, who started the previously
secret Intel research program to explore the possibility of
using standard semiconductor parts to build optical
networks. "We're trying to siliconize photonics."

The device Intel has built is the prototype of a high-speed
silicon optical modulator that the company has now pushed
above two billion bits per second at a lab near its
headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. The modulator makes it
possible to switch off and on a tiny laser beam and direct
it into an ultrathin glass fiber. Although the technical
report in Nature focuses on the modulator, which is only
one component of a networking system, Intel plans on
demonstrating a working system transmitting a movie in
high-definition television over a five-mile coil of
fiberoptic cable next week at its annual Intel Developer
Forum in San Francisco.

"If Intel and other semiconductor technology companies can
develop silicon optically as successfully as they have
electronically, then silicon is certainly set to grow in
stature as an optical material," Graham Reed, a physicist
at the University of Surrey, wrote in a commentary on the
Intel paper in Nature. Dr. Reed is the holder of the
previous 20-megabit silicon optical switching speed record
that Intel shattered.

With this breakthrough, Intel researchers said, they have
shown that it should be possible to build optical fiber
communications systems using Intel's conventional
chipmaking process without resorting to either the exotic
materials or hand-assembly techniques that are now the
standard in the fiberoptics networking industry.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/technology/11CND-CHIP.html?ex=1077530833&ei=1&en=9bc065cfa2f8026c

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