Oct 26 2005
A Photonic Digital Future?
Read this NYT article about a new discovery in laser technology. Basically, it says we now are a lot more closer to a future digital world based on optical infrastructure (vs. today’s mainly electronic one)
The promises:
“The group used a standard chip-making process to design a key component of optical networking gear potentially more than 10 times faster than the highest-performance commercial products available today.”
“… optical data networks were now on the same Moore’s Law curve of increasing performance and falling cost that has driven the computer industry for the past four decades.”
The highlight:
… said David A.B. Miller, from Stanford University: “Those large numbers could get rid of the bottlenecks of wiring, bottlenecks that are quite evident today and are one of the reasons the clock speeds on your desktop computer have not really been going up much in recent years.”
–That professor must be living in a different time-space from the rest of us.