Sorry...I didn't realize that you had to sign up to
read the article. I don't know if I'm signed up..but
I had no problem reading the article the first time.
(I spend about an hour a day just reading tech
news...I think I read more than 50 or more articles a
day) :)
Mary
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The New York Times
October 27, 2005
Engineers Make Leap in Optical Networks
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 26 - A team of Stanford 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 chip-making 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 A. B. 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 1's and 0's.
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
S. 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 the Intel
Corporation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency at the Pentagon. Intel has been intensely
interested in producing optical communications
components with standard chip-making tools, for both
networking and computer communications applications.
Theodore I. 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 was a significant
gap between research results and commercial
availability of devices based on those results.
Several industry executives said the advance was
significant because it meant that optical data
networks were 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 E. 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.