Two years agoIntel and the University of Californiaannounced a new type of interconnection for silicon chips: optical. Electrons do not move here, butphotons at the speed of light. Since then, advances in this field have not stopped happening. Recently, the company published in the magazineOptics Expressthe design and manufacture of aphotodiodeof avalanche made up of germanium / silicon with which a bandwidth of 153 GHz was achieved. they will be radical, according to Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Laboratory. Optical communication will allow usdownload movies from the internet in seconds, or “instant” searches between gygabytes of files.
It has been four decades sinceBob Noyce and Gordon Moore, two of the eight Fairchild children, left their old company and started a new project together: the creation of Integrated Electronics Corporation, Intel, today a world leader in the development of silicon technologies. The first success was reaped in November 1971 with the market launch of theIntel® 4004 microprocessor. It was then incorporated into a calculator with a printer, the Busicom 141-PF, but the design of the new chip was extraordinarily novel: it could be programmed “to measure”. Long before, in 1965, Moore had ventured to predict how the capacity of integrated circuits would evolve: every two years the number of transistors could be doubled without increasing the cost of production. And so it has been,Moore’s Lawit continues to be fulfilled, although as he himself pointed out, a new technology will eventually make it obsolete. Will photonics be the one that will manage to unseat it? Everything points to yes.
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