Researchers from Intel Corporation and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) have built the world’s first electrically powered Hybrid Silicon Laser using standard silicon manufacturing processes. This breakthrough addresses one of the last major barriers to producing low-cost, high-bandwidth silicon photonics devices for use inside and around future computers and data centers.
The researchers were able to combine the light-emitting properties of Indium Phosphide with the light-routing capabilities of silicon into a single hybrid chip. When voltage is applied, light generated in the Indium Phosphide enters the silicon waveguide to create a continuous laser beam that can be used to drive other silicon photonic devices. A laser based on silicon could drive wider use of photonics in computers because the cost can be greatly reduced by using high-volume silicon manufacturing techniques.
“This could bring low-cost, terabit-level optical ‘data pipes’ inside future computers and help make possible a new era of high-performance computing applications,” said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab, in the press release. “While still far from becoming a commercial product, we believe dozens, maybe even hundreds of hybrid silicon lasers could be integrated with other silicon photonic components onto a single silicon chip.”
“Our research program with Intel highlights how industry and academia can work together to advance the state of science and technology,” said John Bowers, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Barbara, in the release. “By combining UCSB’s expertise with Indium Phosphide and Intel’s silicon photonics expertise, we have demonstrated a novel laser structure based on a bonding method that can be used at the wafer-, partial-wafer or die-level, and could be a solution for large-scale optical integration onto a silicon platform. This marks the beginning of highly integrated silicon photonic chips that can be mass produced at low cost.”
While widely used to mass produce affordable digital electronics today, silicon can also be used to route, detect, modulate and even amplify light, but not to effectively generate light. In contrast, Indium Phosphide-based lasers are commonly used today in telecommunications equipment. But the need to individually assemble and align them has made them too expensive to build in the high volumes and at the low costs needed by the PC industry.
The hybrid silicon laser involves a novel design employing Indium Phosphide-based material for light generation and amplification while using the silicon waveguide to contain and control the laser. The key to manufacturing the device is the use of a low-temperature, oxygen plasma — an electrically charged oxygen gas — to create a thin oxide layer (roughly 25 atoms thick) on the surfaces of both materials.
When heated and pressed together the oxide layer functions as a “glass-glue” fusing the two materials into a single chip. When voltage is applied, light generated in the Indium Phosphide-based material passes through the oxide “glass-glue” layer and into the silicon chip’s waveguide, where it is contained and controlled, creating a hybrid silicon laser. The design of the waveguide is critical to determining the performance and specific wavelength of the hybrid silicon laser. More information on the Hybrid Silicon Laser can be found at http://www.intel.com/research/platform/sp/hybridlaser.htm
Today’s announcement builds on Intel’s other accomplishments in its long-term research program to “siliconize” photonics using standard silicon manufacturing processes. In 2004, Intel researchers were the first to demonstrate a silicon-based optical modulator with a bandwidth in excess of 1GHz, nearly 50 times faster than previous demonstrations of modulation in silicon. In 2005, Intel researchers were the first to demonstrate that silicon could be used to amplify light using an external light source to produce a continuous wave laser-on-a-chip based on the “Raman effect.”
Bowers has worked with Indium Phosphide-based materials and lasers for more than 25 years. Currently his research is focused on developing novel optoelectronic devices with data rates as high as 160Gb/s and techniques to bond dissimilar materials together to create new devices with improved performance.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Rainy Day” for the heads up.]
I apologize for the Star Trek comment I recently made…
Great!
Now will you put an Apple Store on State Street.
Wow, I think i understood mayb 3/4 of that, if I’m lucky!
Apple will no doubt use this first.
What does it all mean, Basil?
This is great, but what are you going to do with it. The problem is no longer how fast processors can manage data, it is how fast the buss can get data to and from the processor. Remember, most of the mobo is copper traces connecting discreets, memory and drives to a display.
>Remember, most of the mobo is copper traces connecting discreets, memory and drives to a display.>
Yeah, that’s it in a nut-cake.
Ah yes… I do remember that… (and every time I do it makes me shiiiiivvveeeerr…)
Great. But how many can you mount on to a shark’s head?
Welcome to Slashdot 0.5
I’m really glad that Apple went with Intel. This just seems to have had so many positives so far, and the future looks great, too…
I like rice crispies
I’ll be right back… Gotta go get another 10 degrees before I can really understand this fully. It’s the components that will suffer after this!
To ampar. This guy could put 40 million on the head of anything.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/microscopic.asp
Amazing!
It would be great, in light of Intel’s partnership with Apple if the videos that demonstrate the hybrid laser on the intel site were offered in Quicktime format as well as Windoze Media Files.
I have posted a response to intel on that topic using their “Contact Us” link at the top of the page that has the story. http://www.intel.com/intel/report.htm
The url in to paste into the “URL of the page where you found the problem*:” box is:
http://www.intel.com/research/platform/sp/hybridlaser.htm
Please be nice in your requests for the same at Intel’s site.
Thank you,
7over
ron: That was pretty cool.
My brain is insane in the membrane. I need a drink after reading that……..
MDN,
It’s unfair to assume that anything more than the tiniest wedge of your readers are capable of understanding any of the article. Unfortunately, you’ve done a masterful job of recruiting lamebrains and immature children with your overly opinionated and frightfully biased rants, er “takes”, and along with this comes a collective intelligence that falls woefully short of lnowing or ever even caring what any of that article relates to.
Please stick to cockfighting Ballmer and Glaser from a safe distance. It’s your bread and butter.
I second Cpt. Obvious on this one.
MDN: I check your site many times a day for Apple news but I’m afraid the kiddies have taken over around here.
Windows Vista here!
Want to give Linux a try on your PPC Mac?
It’s so frigging easy to create a “Live CD” and boot off of it. Nothing will be changed on your hard drive.
There is lots of free software and you can use a USB flash drive to store files on.
It’s just interesting to mess around with.
All you do is download the ISO and
Launch Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility)
Drag the ISO to the sidebar of the Disk Utility main window.
Select the ISO where you just dragged it, and choose (Menu > Image > Burn…)
Insert a blank CD > Burn.
Reboot and your up in Linux.
It’s no Mac OS X, but it can be useful to take with you.
http://www.ubuntu.com/
Just got my iMac Core 2 Duo. Saweeet! This thing FSCKING ROX!!!MAXED OUT AT 2.33 processor, 2 GIGS RAM, 500Gb Disk Space, 256 AT Card! All I cahn say – It’s about friggin’ time.
Billy Bob Bi Baggin’s
Theoretical technology is great, but I’ll start getting excited when I see something that this gets used in that I can benefit from directly.
twilightmoon@mac.com
YOU TOSSER………
Electrons vs Photons: Why Light?
Two paths with electrons running through them affect each other the closer they are together (capacitance). In addition, electron flow is reduced as its frequency increases (impedance). All of these factors become major obstacles when you miniaturize the circuits into something as small as an IC chip.
Photons do not have these issues and limitations. In theory, you can build a photon-based CPU chip that can run calculations well into the Terahertz (1000s of Gigabytes/sec) range.
While photons do suffer from the same resistance problems of smaller pathways, they do not generate any heat, which is a major physical issue with miniaturized electronics.
In short, photonic circuits will use 1/10th of the energy, generate no heat, and produce 1000 times the computing speed.
Photonic circuitry has many other advantages that require all new thinking apart from electronics design. For example, rather than having 64 parallel circuit paths to address a memory location, you can have 64 different frequencies of light carry the same information on one optic path. Now, imagine 500 different frequencies of light carrying information simultaneously on ONE path, clocked at speeds 1000 times greater than computers today, running continuously all month on a watch battery.
THIS is why mass production of optical circuitry is a BIG DEAL!
There are other optical computing technologies under development.
The transistor laser:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb06/2800
“Our team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has at its disposal an extraordinary prototype transistor that can switch on and off more than 700 billion times per second, faster than any other transistor in the world. On a hunch two years ago, we inspected in greater depth some samples of this transistor, which are made from indium phosphide and indium-gallium-arsenide, the same sort of semiconductor compounds used in today’s light-emitting diodes and laser diodes.”
Next step, Skynet.