SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 12, 2004 — Scientists from Intel Corporation have achieved a major advance using silicon manufacturing processes to create a novel “transistor-like” device that can encode data onto a light beam. The ability to build a fast photonic (fiber optic) modulator from standard silicon could lead to very low-cost, high-bandwidth fiber optic connections among PCs, servers and other electronic devices, and eventually inside computers as well.

As reported in today’s issue of the journal Nature, Intel researchers split a beam of light into two separate beams as it passed through silicon, and then used a novel transistor-like device to hit one beam with an electric charge, inducing a ‘phase shift.’ When the two beams of light are re-combined the phase shift induced between the two arms makes the light exiting the chip go on and off at over one gigahertz (one billion bits of data per second), 50 times faster than previously produced on silicon. This on and off pattern of light can be translated into the 1’s and 0’s needed to transmit data.