Superfast Silicon Optics
Historically, photonic devices, such as the modulators that encode data onto light beams, have been made of exotic materials. In 2004, however, Intel researcher Mario Paniccia and his team showed that with clever engineering, modulators and lasers could be made from silicon. Paniccia’s latest invention is shown above. A modulator sits on the millimeter-wide strip of silicon at the center of the device. It has reached speeds of 30 gigabits (the equivalent of about 8,000 digital photos) per second, approaching the 40-gigabit-per-second speed of today’s best modulators. Paniccia says his technology could be commercialized by 2010. He adds that 25 silicon lasers combined with “an array of 25 modulators operating at 40 gigabits per second” would yield “a terabit of information all on a piece of silicon the size of my fingernail.”

Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.