World's First Cascaded Raman Silicon Laser

Intel Fellow Mario Paniccia takes us inside the Silicon Photonics Lab in Santa Clara, CA to describe another breakthrough from his team. Nature Photonics Magazine first published Intel's Cascaded Raman Silicon Laser in late February 2008. This could help lead to compact, lower cost silicon lasers used in spectroscopy, sensing and medical devices, as well as used for measuring or detecting greenhouse gasses, methane gas and water vapor.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Intel
• Silicon
• Photonics
• Raman
• Laser
• Mario
• Paniccia

[kurtnelle]

And thus began LightPeak

[vanko81]

Indeed, what is the relationship with Raman [ besides one of the many possible applications] - misleading title!

[backstabingliar]

I don't get it. What does Raman scattering has to do with this?

[afxgrin]

Cool. Too bad they can't make silicon lase at useful wavelengths on it's own.

This is still very useful however, just as he mentions. Good video otherwise.

I'm curious as to what research has been performed into compacting the ring waveguides. I imagine evanescent wave coupling is a problem however.

[illsbills]

you'd think that Intel can make videos where you actually see the slides ...

[BurtWilson1]

Maybe the end of Moore's Law isn't such a bad thing. People perform best when under pressure. Looks like optical is the way to go, which will open up huge gains in computing power.

[CohanDigitmatta]

brilliant

[jfinnican]

Actually, we have already been able to use the atom to do computation. Its on a very, very rudimentary level, but it is being done.

Eventually, the technology will surpass transistors and they will become obsolete.

[KaoriBlue]

By the time you can handle single atoms (this might take awhile - Moore's law will hit a hard wall soon somewhere below the new 32nm chips), you'll be able to efficiently make powerful new architectures (spintronics, quantum computers, etc.). Until then, the focus is on making chips with multiple interconnected cores and writing better software that can easily be parallized. You'll notice that most 'supercomputers' today are enormous collections of the kind of cores you have in your desktop.

[howboutdat1227]

im so confused :( .......

but im confused, moores law states that every 2 years the size of a transitor gets smaller and the # of transistors in a processor gets much larger, but what happenes when we get as small as a single atom? can we get any smaller?