The race to replace copper wiring with optics in chip-to-chip communications reached a new milestone last week as Intel announced it had produced a system using silicon-based photonics to transmit data between printed circuit boards at 50 gigabits per second.
”We’re bringing silicon manufacturing to optical communication,” says Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab. ”It changes the way in the future that we’re going to connect.” Until recently, optical communications was done using exotic semiconductors and other expensive components. Making such systems in silicon should lower their price and allow for easy integration into computers.
Some really interesting stuff going on, but how do you breadboard it?
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A company I used to work for, Luxtera, did a lot of this years ago. bunnie used to work there too.