Luxtera, a small startup based on technology pioneered at the California Institute of Technology, planned to announce yesterday a new class of silicon chips that blur the line between electronic computing and optical communications.
The chips, which contain both traditional electronic circuits and ultrathin conduits for laser light, herald the potential to blend the low-cost manufacturing prowess of the semiconductor world with the ultrahigh-speed potential of laser optical networking.
The convergence of the two technologies is expected to have a major impact on the computing and communications industries, both in the design of future computers and on drastically less expensive networks that will make applications of such fiber-optic networks to homes commercially viable.
"This is the opening of a new field," said Alan Huang, a physicist who pioneered optical communications research at Bell Laboratories during the 1980s.
"This falls exactly between two technologies," he said.
Luxtera, which is based in Carlsbad, California, said that it planned to introduce chips that would make inexpensive 10-gigabit office networks possible in April next year. The 10-gigabit network would be a thousand times faster than those today.
Luxtera is the first company to announce commercial plans for all-in-one chips based on industry standard manufacturing techniques. However, the Intel Corp has already made several research announcements in the field, and several industry executives said that other companies were working to enter the market with similar products.
The Luxtera announcement is a significant advance over speeds described by the Intel researchers in scientific journals. Last year, Intel, which is based in Santa Clara, California, reported that it had achieved speeds in excess of one gigahertz in the laboratory.
In contrast, Luxtera's chief executive, Alex Dickinson, said that the start-up had created prototype chips that reached data rates of 10 gigabits a second. A spokesman for Intel, Robert Manetta, said that Intel researchers had also reached the 10-gigabit figure, but had not yet published their results.
That speed is significant because one-gigabit wire network connections are becoming inexpensive commodities and 10 gigabits has so far been achievable only with complex and expensive electro-optical systems.
"Ten gigabits is the tipping point," said Dickinson. He said that traditional optical fiber had been best at transporting data, while metal wire-based electronic systems had been best at processing data. Now the two domains are beginning to merge, he said.
At the same time, he acknowledged that the Luxtera designers were still not certain of how the technology would evolve.
The company plans to use Freescale Semiconductor, based in Austin, Texas, and formerly part of the Motorola Corp, to manufacture its chips, which potentially gives it access to a variety of computing circuits that could push the technology toward different applications.
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