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IBM scientists today took another significant advance towards sending information inside a computer chip by using light pulses instead of electrons by building the world’s tiniest nanophotonic switch with a footprint about 100X smaller than the cross section of a human hair. The switch is an important building block to control the flow of information inside future chips and can significantly speed up the chip performance while using much less energy.

“This new development is a critical addition in the quest to build an on-chip optical network,” – said Yurii Vlasov, manager of silicon nanophotonics at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center. “In view of all the progress that this field has seen for the last few years it looks that our vision for on-chip optical networks is becoming more and more realistic”.

Today’s announcement is another significant advance in their quest to develop next generation high-performance multi-core computer chips which transmit information internally using pulses of light traveling through silicon instead of electrical signals on copper wires.

Source: http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=4964.php

If I had told you ten years ago that by the end of 2007 there would be an international network of wirelessly-connected computers throughout the developing world, you might well have said it wasn't possible.

I would probably have said the same, but as it turns out we would have been wrong: it was possible, and it was created, and it continues to expand, not through Non-Governmental Organisations or charity or development grants but through the market, with much of it financed by some of the poorest people on the planet.

I am talking, of course, about the mobile phone network.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7106998.stm

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has launched a new research network which is up to 20,000 times faster and one million times the capacity of a typical home broadband connection.

The Broadband Optical Research, Education and Sciences Network (or BOREAS-Net), forms a loop of fibre optic cable between UW-Madison, Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Minnesota. It features two links to Internet2, at Chicago and Kansas City, Missouri. Any outage anywhere in the loop is essentially unnoticed as traffic is rerouted at the speed of light to the other access point.

Source: http://www.theengineer.co.uk/Articles/299243/Network+outpaces+internet.htm

The HomePlug Powerline Alliance (HPPA) used CeBIT as a platform to announce new products and talk up HomePlug AV, their home networking technology. Linksys is the one of the companies exhibiting HomePlug AV gear to the market, announcing the new PLE200 PowerLine AV networking adapter. Buyers will get two adapters, both of which contain an Ethernet jack and plug into a wall outlet to handle all of your networking needs over your house's wiring.

That's the attraction of HomePlug AV—the possibility of easy, wired networking without having to run Cat5e or Cat6 cable throughout your dwelling. HomePlug AV was finalized in late 2005. HomePlug AV is the successor to HomePlug 1.0 and its paltry data throughput of 8.2Mbps, and products supporting the newer standard are finally beginning to show up in force on the market.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070316-homeplug-av-networking-tech-takes-stage-at-cebit.html

The world's first computers whose architecture can adopt different forms depending on their application have been developed by Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN).

Dubbed MONARCH (Morphable Networked Micro-Architecture) and developed to address the large data volume of sensor systems as well as their signal and data processing throughput requirements, it is the most adaptable processor ever built for the Department of Defense, reducing the number of processor types required.

It performs as a single system on a chip, resulting in a significant reduction of the number of processors required for computing systems, and it performs in an array of chips for teraflop throughput.

Source:http://www.mil-embedded.com/news/db/?5784