Intel scientists create world's fastest silicon photonics device

Scientists from Intel Corporation have achieved a major advance using silicon
manufacturing processes to create a novel 'transistor-like' device that can
encode data onto a light beam. The ability to build a fast photonic (fiber
optic) modulator from standard silicon could lead to very low-cost,
high-bandwidth fiber optic connections among PCs, servers and other electronic
devices and eventually inside computers as well.

Intel researchers split a beam of light into two separate beams as it passed
through silicon, and then used a novel transistor-like device to hit one beam
with an electric charge, inducing a 'phase shift'. When the two beams of
light are re-combined, the phase shift induced between the two arms makes the
light exiting the chip go on and off at over one Gigahertz (one billion bits of
data per second), 50 times faster than previously produced on silicon. This
on-and-off pattern of light can be translated into the 1's and 0's needed to
transmit data.

"This is a significant step toward building optical devices that move
data around inside a computer at the speed of light," said Patrick
Gelsinger, Senior VP and Chief Technology Officer at Intel. He added that it
could help make the Internet run faster, build much faster high-performance
computers and enable high bandwidth applications like ultra-high-definition
displays or vision recognition systems.

The fabrication of commercial optical devices has favored expensive and
exotic materials requiring complex manufacturing, till date, thus limiting their
use to such specialty markets as wide area networks and telecommunications.
Intel's fabrication of a fast silicon-based optical modulator with performance
that exceeds 1 GHz demonstrates the viability of standard silicon as a material
for bringing the benefits of high-bandwidth optics to a much wider range of
computing and communications applications.

Silicon Photonics research at Intel began in the mid-1990s with efforts to
test and measure transistors switching inside microprocessors optically.
Although silicon appears opaque to the naked eye, it is transparent to infrared
light.

"Just as Superman's X-ray vision allows him to see through walls, if
you had infrared vision you could see through silicon," said Mario Paniccia,
Director of Silicon Photonics Research at Intel. This makes it possible to route
infrared light in silicon, which is the same wavelength typically used for
optical communications. The way electrical charges move around in a transistor
when voltage is applied can be used to change the behavior of light as it passes
through these charges. This led the company to explore manipulating the
properties of light, such as phase and amplitude, to produce silicon-based
optical devices.

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