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There's a reason that the Internet backbone is made of fiber-optic cables: photons transport bits of information faster than electrons. But while photons and fiber are the most efficient way of sending data across continents, it's still cheaper and easier to use electrons in copper wiring for most data transfer over shorter distances.

Now Intel plans to sell inexpensive cables with fiber-optic-caliber speed to connect, for instance, a laptop and an external hard drive, or a phone and a desktop computer. At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco Wednesday, the company announced a new type of optical cable that it hopes will be fast, cheap, and thin enough to make it an attractive replacement for multiple copper wires.

By 2010, says Dadi Perlmutter, vice president of Intel's mobility group, the company hopes to ship an optical cable called Light Peak that will be able to zip 10 gigabits of data per second from one gadget to another, a rate equivalent of transferring a Blu-ray movie from a computer to a mobile video player in 30 seconds.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23523

Intel Corp. is studying optical interconnects with an eye toward replacing chip-to-chip electrical interconnects in order to overcome looming bandwidth issues as microprocessors with an increasing number of cores usher in the era of tera-scale computing.

Ian Young, an Intel Fellow and director of the No. 1 semiconductor company's advanced circuits and technology integration project, presented a paper at the IEEE's International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) here Wednesday (Feb. 11) describing progress in integrating the waveguides, detectors and modulators needed for integrating photonic interconnects directly onto CMOS chips.

Young described the performance of an eight-channel, 90-nm device that has demonstrated transmission and reception speed of up to 10Gb/s. The company's longer-term goal is to make optical components that can achieve higher bandwidth of between 100GB/s to 1 TB/s, Young said.

Source: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213900581

Recent advancements might finally open the door to a new storage technology that will merge optical and magnetic technologies, leading to high capacity storage devices reaching speeds thousands of times that of existing storage technologies, while boasting improved reliability.

In 2006 Dr. Daniel Stanciu (then working on his Ph.D.) and Dr. Fredrik Hansteen discovered a way to use light to change the polarity of a magnet. Even more impressive was the fact that it only took an extremely short laser pulse of about 40 femtoseconds (an unimaginably short time equal to one millionth of a nanosecond) in order to switch a magnet. According to Stanciu, back in 2006, conventional wisdom in the field considered this feat to be impossible. Even Stanciu’s Professor did not believe the young researcher until the latter demonstrated the switch in the lab.

Source: http://thefutureofthings.com/news/6186/laser-hard-drives-in-the-making.html

When you drop an optical disk into your computer, gaming console, or player of choice, the machine reads information off the surface of the disc. The density of data is limited by the wavelength of the light used to read and write the data. Currently, available technology allows us to store around 25 GB of data on a single layer, so up to 50 GB of data can go on one side of a dual layer disc; some future formats are promising even more.

A new research paper in this week's edition of Applied Optics describes a method of storing data throughout the volume of a disc, and its authors have built a demonstration system that uses a standard-size (120mm x 1.2mm) optical disc to store 1 TB of data.

Exploiting three dimensions for storage opens up a great deal more space for data. Given a 532 nm laser, then the maximum storage density on a disc surface is limited to 3.5x108 bits/cm2. If data is encoded in all three dimensions, then the data density can reach as high as 6.5x1012 bit/cm3.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080729-optical-storage-goes-deep-1tb-stored-in-three-dimensions.html

Nanoelectronics deals with functional electron devices, such as transistors, in the nanoscale range size. As the name implies, nanoelectronics runs on electricity, i.e. the transport of electrons. Another approach to creating faster,smaller and more energy-efficient electronics is to move the field of optical information processing towards the nanoscale.

Optical nanoelectronics will work with light instead of electron transport. Here the usual circuit elements such as inductors, capacitors and resistors could be created in order to operate using infrared or visible light. Using nanotechnology, researchers are able to create structures that could operate on the same or smaller scale as the wavelength of light (the wavelength of visible light is roughly between 400 and 700 nanometers).

Going beyond 'conventional' nanoelectronics, researchers have now proposed a form of optical circuitry in which a network of subwavelength nanoscale metamaterial structures and nanoparticles may provide a mechanism for tailoring, patterning, and manipulating optical electric fields in a subwavelength domain, leading to the possibility of optical information processing at the nanometer scale.

Source: http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=2947.php