What's different about this relative to the normal read device for CD's, DVDs?
Read devices for CD's and DVD's use a laser to read off of a spinning disc. This sounds like a new interface between computer chips, one which can be operated at a higher frequency (thus sending more data in less time) than current interfaces.
In traditional systems, signals are sent and amplified electrically, but here they are talking about replacing the electrical circuitry within the chips, and between chips, with light...atleast that's what I inferred from scanning the excerpt.
IMHO, CDs and DVDs are just storage devices for data. This stuff claims: "The breakthrough was achieved by bonding a layer of light-emitting indium phosphide onto the surface of a standard silicon chip etched with special channels that act as light-wave guides. The resulting sandwich has the potential to create on a computer chip hundreds and possibly thousands of tiny, bright lasers that can be switched on and off billions of times a second."
"In the past it has proved impossible to couple standard silicon with the exotic materials that emit light when electrically charged. But the university team supplied a low-temperature bonding technique that does not melt the silicon circuitry. The approach uses an electrically charged oxygen gas to create a layer of oxide just 25 atoms thick on each material. When heated and pressed together, the oxide layer fuses the two materials into a single chip that conducts information both through wires and on beams of reflected light."
This is a transmission interface between light and electricity, IMHO. My question is it in one direction or both? It appears both. I could be wrong.
My take on this is that within your computer it has two primary benefits:It would appear that it could make distributed processing transcendently more practical than at present. You might abandon the concept of a "central" processing unit and make an array of smart RAM chips instead - each with its own on-chip processing capability, and each better able to communicate with each of the others than present electronic communication between the CPU and RAM chips on the motherboard.
- facilitate making data paths across a cpu
- facilitate communication of data from one chip to another, bypassing - probably eliminating - the motherboard.
You would package the chips in a 3-D array rather than restricting yourself to a plane. The only electrical connections would be dc power to the chips; you would pack the chips in a roughly spherical clump - as tightly together as heat dissipation requirements allowed.