The recent news from Intel about its laser chips represents a significant milestone in semiconductor technology. When will these new chips turn up in a computer that you can buy? Not any time soon, but they will, they will.
The world’s largest chip maker developed the breakthrough technology (that’s a phrase which gets used way too much in the high-tech industry, but it’s highly appropriate in this instance) in association with researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Intel is calling this part a hybrid silicon laser, because the device is fabricated partly with silicon and partly with indium phosphide, a compound semiconductor used to make high-speed communications and networking chips. What’s important about this chip is that it will speed up data flow from chip to chip by an order of magnitude. Your high-end PC now may have a microprocessor doing its work at 3 gigahertz or a higher speed, but its connections to other chips on the PC motherboard and elsewhere in the PC box are running much, much slower. This Intel-UCSB collaboration isn’t the only development in this area; Japanese researchers are working on the problem employing erbium-based devices, according to The New York Times, and small suppliers of optical components have been tackling the issue for years.
On another chip frontier, Samsung Electronics has produced a working prototype of a phase-change memory. This next-generation device may succeed the flash memory chips now going into cell phones, digital cameras, MP3 music players, and other consumer electronics. The world’s largest producer of memory semiconductors developed the chip with technology licensed from a small American firm, Ovonyx. Phase-change memories will work faster and last longer than flash memories.
When will these advanced chips turn up in products on the shelves of Best Buy or Circuit City? Maybe in five to 10 years. So, don’t get too excited, for now.
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