telecom user here, commercial fibers can do 400Gbps max speed
in labs research groups have gotten Pb traffic
Fiber Optics
Charles Collins
Luis Perez
Da-damn. The future sounds fast.
Ryan Gomez
> en.wikipedia.org
Probably similar in principle to what you're thinking of.
Andrew Cook
Anthony Nguyen
That's called an optical interconnect. The problem is generating and sensing the light in a small form factor.
en.wikipedia.org
As we make transistors smaller, we need to pack wires going into the chip into a smaller space, this increases parasitic capacitance and signal delay.
Optics don't have this problem
light is big. about 40 transistors could fit in the wavelength of red light.
So are computer chips
Evan Wright
Less power use and significantly lower error rate than silicon and copper which allows for M-Ary data transfer. Surely the question is when.
Austin Russell
Optics are good (if not the best) for long distance transfer of information but I don't see the purpose of it in really close distances (such as PC architecture). You'd need amplifiers/converters at each entering/exiting node plus glass cables need to be really clean in order to function properly so cleaning your PC could be only done by professionals and let's not even mention the problem with dust that accumulates in PCs.
It's just not practical at the moment. Maybe some kind of revolution in technology will change that.
Camden Russell
Mix some sodium chloride and put it into a thin hose. Put the hose in the freezer. Activate absolute-zero mode. Take the hose and run a current through it. Goals.
Check mate, physicists.
Wyatt Cooper
>light is big. about 40 transistors could fit in the wavelength of red light.
yet a single wave could carry more information than 40 transistors in one clock-cycle.
because there are a lot more hues to red than there are 1's and 0's in 40 transistors.
optical circuits WILL be the future of computation.
Robert Robinson
But you obtain a slower clock speed because the light has to travel larger distances between photonic elements.
Optical communication between chips makes sense, optical computing as the chips does not.