INTEL researchers have constructed an all-silicon laser pushing the company a step closer to using light waves, rather than electric currents to process data. Currently, lasers that power fast optical networks require exotic - and expensive - materials and are mainly used in vast communications networks. Intel hopes Silicon lasers also could be mass produced, using the same equipment on which standard chips are made. "Once you have silicon as an optical material, then you can take advantage of this enormous (silicon) infrastructure that exists around the world," Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's photonics lab said. "You can imagine starting to 'siliconise' photonic devices, and maybe integrate photonics and electronics." If Intel can develop the technology, the movement of data within computers would keep up with the ever-increasing speed of microprocessors, breaking through an increasingly problematic bottleneck that exists for users of complex programs, such as video editors, and large businesses and government applications. But silicon, the semiconductor that makes up computer memory and logic chips, has only recently been considered for use in photonics, or light-based technology - and it promises to revolutionise that field as it did electronics. The Intel research, co-authored by Paniccia and posted on the web site of journal Nature, involved creating a laser with a single silicon chip. Like all lasers, it emitted a focused stream of light that ultimately could be manipulated to carry vast amounts of data at high speeds. Ultimately, silicon-based lasers and other optical devices could be used to break through bottlenecks in the data paths between chips inside computers. "Our goal is to drive this technology to a point where we actually converge communications and computing," Mr Paniccia said.
