In what may prove to be a technological breakthrough of immense proportions, Stanford University announced on Thursday that members of it's electrical engineering department have come up with a solution to what has until now been a major road block in chip development progress. Their development is a new component that can easily be built in to chips to break laser beams in to billions of bits of data per second. We all know that light can carry data at much higher rates than electricity, but until now it has been too cost prohibitive and difficult to attempt to integrate light based circuitry in to silicon chips in electronics.
W.M. Keck Foundation Professor of Electrical Engineering, David A.B. Miller and fellow researcher James Harris estimate that the device, a modulator, could be as small as a millionth of a meter tall and about as long. They estimate that it could operate at rates greater than 100 billion times a second, or 50 times faster than the rate of data transmissions in the computer hardware of today.
