A team of researchers from Intel and the University of California announced last week that they have developed a silicon-based chip capable of producing laser beams!

Great, you say. So what, it's StarWars in my PC?
Allez.
By using light instead of wires to send data between chips or to the memory, we solve the principal bottleneck in computers.

Even if it is announced now, there will be no commercial application before 2010. But the door is opened to many things: routers and switchs mega-high-speed, very quick and very cheap processors, ... That would definitively kill the Moore's Law (which is already almost dead).

Lasers already relay heavy volumes of data over long distances, on optic cables. In computer chips, data passes through the wires at great speeds, but slows to a crawl when moving from one chip to another inside a computer.
With laser beams, we speak about unprecedented speeds.


"This is a field that has just begun exploding in the past 18 months," said Eli Yablonovitch, a physicist at the University of California.


Source: The New-York Times, two weeks ago.