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Light Emitting Silicon, check it out

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The_Mowman

Registered
Joined
Oct 10, 2002
Location
MD
This just was announced today and was brought to my attention during an Electrical engineering class this morning. A company has come out with way of making light emitting silicon that will significantly speed up processor speeds by allowing the clock signal to reach all parts of the chip at the same time, which will almost eliminate gate delay. Theres an article on Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/10/28/1256254.shtml?tid=137

One on New York Times: (You need to register to see it)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/28/technology/28CHIP.html

And here is the company's website's press release:
http://us.st.com/stonline/press/news/year2002/t1098d.htm

If this goes mainstream, some are calling it the holy grail of the semiconductor industry. just thought you guys would be interested. I am going to multi post this also in the AMD section.
 
Definitely some interesting articles. Thanks for posting 'em.

The semiconductor industry has seen a lot of holy grails over the years. This one looks promising, and it is a significant breakthrough. But I very much doubt it means we'll be seeing light speed processors anytime soon.

Making a complete, multipurpose processor out of this stuff would be nearly impossible to do cost-effectively. However, I'll bet traces of this technology will start showing up in chips within the next 5 years.

If anything fully optical processors will mean the most for telecommunications, where switching back and forth from optics to electrons is painfully slow. Fully optical routers have been around for a couple years already though and haven't taken off yet.
 
Hey Guys, Ive heard abuot this technology a month ago. it looks very promessing but will probably be very expencive. I read an article in a computer paper before and have come to the conclusion that this will definately change the ways of computers in the not too distant future. Another interesting thing ive read about was a holo/3D monitor being developed. Though i do not have enough information about this, im sure that this along with the new silicon technology will give rise to a new era for computers.
 
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