New Chip To Enable Super-Fast Downloads

Sep. 18 - KGO (KGO) -- Some big news from Silicon Valley of a breakthrough in technology. A major hurdle has been removed that will significantly speed up chips to download digital content, such as movies. ABC7's David Louie has been in the Intel lab where the drive to discover faster computing speed has been underway.

Intel engineers have been working on this project in this lab for five years. They've been trying to put laser beams inside a computer chip to speed up how much data it can process. They've been focusing on laser beams because they don't create noise or interference the way copper wires do.

Victor Krutul, M.S., M.B.A, Intel Silicon Photonics Strategy Director: "With optical, you don't have this problem. Photons, light beams, don't interact with each other. Therefore, not only can we send the data much further, we can send it at much faster, much higher bandwidth."

This tiny die or strip contains 36 lasers. The challenge was bonding that set of lasers onto a chip to allow the silicon to process data. The laser beams act as the data highway.

Mario Paniccia, Silicon Photonics Research Director: "Here we've taken these two materials separately, and through a unique process that was developed at the University of California Santa Barbara, with a low-temperature, plasma-enhanced, oxidation process, we've been able to bond these two materials, and the sum of that bond created this hybrid silicon laser."

There is a push for faster speed because of the advent of digital entertainment. We're already downloading music and video to our home computers.

Apple last week announced consumers can download movies. But the download process can take two hours or longer, even with a DSL or cable high-speed connection.

Digital media today also is compressed to make the data files smaller. That can compromise quality.

Victor Krutul: "In the future, you won't need to do compression and decompression because you'll have all the bandwidth you really need to transmit large amounts of data, real-time movies, maybe even download a couple of movies to watch over the weekend, and do this in a couple of seconds."

Think of that. A full-length movie in a couple of seconds.

The process of making this new kind of chip is not going to be complicated. It can be done using the same fabrication plans turning out today's chips.

Intel says the hybrid silicon laser chip can process one trillion bytes per second. Dozens, even hundreds of lasers, can be put on a single chip, further increasing its speed.

The initial users of the hybrid chip will be servers -- the gateways that put digital content onto the Internet. Engineers say personal computers won't be far behind, opening up a whole new way for consumers to get media faster than we can imagine.

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