Using light to transmit data is an area of great interest to virtually all tech companies. At the moment, copper/silicon technology is undergoing progressive miniaturization in an effort to increase speed and density. But at some point, the laws of physics will prevent any further refinement; the copper’s resistance will increase as its cross-section shrinks. Thus, a large amount of research is done to find the heir to copper’s throne in the microchip industry.

Ansheng Liu, the principal engineer of Intel’s corporate technology group announced the development of a silicon optical modulator that encodes data on an optical beam at 40 billion bits per second (40 Gigabits/sec). When combined with Intel’s silicon laser technology, it will be possible to construct an optical microchip that can transmit terabytes of data every second via several silicon photonic circuits.

More at Research@Intel.

Technorati Tags: Intel, Photonics, Optical Computing, Microchips