The Light and The Processor

Data transferring speeds inside modern day computer devices is locked at the speed of the electric current that powers those circuits. As the speed of the current can not be easily increased since the circuits become smaller and smaller, another way to increase the data rate would be to use light as a transferring medium. However, until now, the technologies necessary for this step were very costly and hard to implement in small scale circuits.

Now, researchers from the University of Santa Barbara announced in a press release that together with engineers from Intel they have just completed the world's first silicon evanescent laser. This means a great step ahead towards combining the existing electronic circuits built on a silicon die with optical components and laser based data pathways. The research effort aims at combining the two, until now, separate technologies into a single new generation of circuits that will come with less manufacturing costs and will need less power to operate. Mode-locked evanescent lasers can shoot short bursts of laser light that are used in many applications like high-speed data transmission, multiple wavelength generation, remote sensing and highly accurate optical clocks.

As computer technology and just about all electronic devices are based on silicon, creating a silicon die that can deliver laser pulse and show a number of other useful optical properties would mean that all data pathways could by simply replaced by laser bursts that would dramatically increase the data transferring speeds. The main problem is that it is almost impossible to integrate a laser on a silicon die, but less than a year ago, a study conducted by a research team at UCSB and Intel showed that such a laser can be created. Now, the electrical pumped lasers are used to fire 40 billion pulses of light per second, a very high rate and the first to match the rate of the signal speed in other media in use today.

The short bursts of laser light are composed of many separate colors, so each color could be used to carry different information, replacing practically the need of several lasers with just one. Creating laser generators and pathways in silicon dies will lead to the creation of optoelectronic devices that could increase the speed at which information travels inside a computer chip, while still using standard already existing silicon technology.