The dream of silicon lasers is close to realisation, Intel said earlier this week, with success in achieving very high speeds set to turn communications and server designs topsy-turvy.

Mario Paniccia, Intel Fellow at the Photonics Technology Lab, said that the firm had met many of the challenges of putting lasers on silicons, so enabling fast communication but with devices that take advantage of Moore’s Law and the relative cheapness of silicon.

The devices Paniccia showed the IT Examiner in the Intel Labs at its HQ in Santa Clara will create price and performance disparities between existing and future tech in “orders of magnitude”, he said.

Even though silicon lasers won’t span vast distances, Paniccia said that designs that Intel envisaged would dispense with bulky existing fibre transceivers and enable new designs at the server level. Memory, for example, could be easily taken off mainboards and put in separate places, allowing for slimmer and more heat efficient server racks and blades.

Paniccia demonstrated such a mocked up system, where memory was taken off a board and fibre operating at very high speeds was accessed elsewhere. Although he would not be drawn on specific speeds that Intel was achieving in its labs, he hinted that announcements were not far off. Because silicon lasers did not require the most advanced process technologies to build, that also introduced  economies into their manufacture.

ROMs (remote optical memories) weren’t built in a day, but have been in development at Intel for the last three years or so. Intel, of course, is not the only company working on such technologies, but Paniccia believes his firm has the advantage because of its knowledge of silicon. X