Chip Melds Optics and Electronics
Posted on: Tuesday, 29 March 2005, 09:00 CST
Luxtera, a start-up based on technology pioneered at the California Institute of Technology, said Monday that it had created a class of silicon chips that blurs the line between electronic computing and optical communications.
The chips, which contain both traditional electronic circuits and ultrathin conduits for laser light, herald the potential to blend the low-cost manufacturing prowess of the semiconductor world with the ultrahigh-speed potential of laser optical networking.
The convergence of the two technologies is expected to have a major impact on the computing and communications industries, both in the design of future computers and on drastically less expensive networks that will make applications of such fiber optic networks to homes commercially viable.
Luxtera, based in Carlsbad, California, said that it planned to introduce chips that would make inexpensive 10-gigabit office networks possible in April 2006. The 10-gigabit network would be a thousand times faster than those today.
Luxtera is the first company to announce commercial plans for all- in-one chips based on industry standard manufacturing techniques.
But Intel has made research announcements in the field, and several industry executives said that other companies were working to enter the market.
The Luxtera announcement is a significant advance over speeds described by the Intel researchers in scientific journals. Last year, Intel, which is based in Santa Clara, California, reported that it had achieved speeds in excess of one gigahertz in the laboratory.
In contrast, Luxtera's chief executive, Alex Dickinson, said the start-up had created prototype chips that reached data rates of 10 gigabits a second. A spokesman for Intel, Robert Manetta, said that Intel researchers had also reached the 10-gigabit figure but had not yet published their results. That speed is significant because one- gigabit wire network connections are becoming inexpensive commodities and 10 gigabits has so far been achievable only with complex and expensive electro-optical systems.
Luxtera plans to use Freescale Semiconductor, formerly part of Motorola, to manufacture its chips, which potentially gives it access to a variety of computing circuits that could push the technology toward different applications.
Source: International Herald Tribune
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