Intel has once again shown that silicon modulators can prove as worthy as their non-silicon and expensive counterparts. The company has successfully developed a new silicon modulator that can encode data onto beams of light at a rate of 40Gbps. This new modulator is 10Gbps faster that the company’s earlier invention.
Modulators are one of the major components in fiber-optic networks and are used to convert bits of information into pulses of light so that they can be transmitted over a fiber-optic network. Today’s modulators rely on expensive materials such as Lithium Niobate to achieve speeds up to 40Gbps. Their being expensive is not the only problem researchers face, another problem is that they cannot be easily shrunk down and mass-produced.
With this invention, researchers now hope to revolutionize the telecom industry by developing modulators and other photonic devices out of cheap silicon. The same technology can also replace copper wires inside your computer that are used to transfer data to and from the different cores of the CPU and different memory locations.
Intel hopes the time when hybrid lasers and modulators will come on a single chip, they also expect that by 2012 they will be having a fingernail-sized chip that can send a terabit’s worth of data. Once this is achieved, rendering 3D graphics on computers in real time will become possible and not to mention you will be able to download full DVD-sized movies in seconds…!
Via: Technology Review
