I See the Light!

IMB researchers recently developed a chip that can transmit and slow down the speed of light!

Researchers from IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center combined . . . two technologies to develop a chip with photonic waveguide and reduce light speed to 1/300 of its normal level by heating the waveguide.

The chip works a bit like a speed camera. Light comes barrelling past at its normal 186,000 miles per second, jams on the anchors to one 1/300th of its normal speed as it passes by the holes and then speeds up again.

IBM says that the slower light pulses could carry data rapidly it could also be slowed further by applying an electric field to the waveguide.

For those of you that dont get what this means: Optical transmission is the most used in world communication networks due to its much higher efficiency than electronic transmission. But information storage is difficult and optical signals must be converted to electronic ones before they can be stored. This gets much, much closer to being able to store optical signals in an efficient manner.

Amazing, to think technology advances each second that passes. If this chip was to be on the market i guess it would be put into almost all computers or am i mistake the chip for something else? If it went on the market how much would it cost and would it be worth the price? but please excuse my curiousness

Considering that right now all this thing does is slow light, it probably wouldnt be worth a damn thing to most people. If they get the tech to the point that they can use it to store data in an optical manner then its going to kick major fucking ass. Try to understand, an OPTICAL FUCKING HARDDRIVE. If you are using or know anything about fiber and having fiber to the desktop and enjoying Gb bandwidth, then you can understand what a true optical HD would do for computers.

well thanks im a bit new to this subject if you can bare with me but this technology sounds as dull as looking at a fly getting flatten but thanks any way

The speed implications are unreal but it'd be interesting to see how and if they will make a storage device efficient. It begs the question of storage though, unless you can make a device 100% efficient or unless it is going to be used in an 'always on' environment then I don't see how you can make an optical storage device viable as yet. The other question that comes to my mind is one of heat. How much will this kind of technology generate and will this then create other problems.

I've not had much chance to dig but I suspect that the first applications of optical storage and processing is likely to be in processors and RAM rather than Hard drives. The other major area of interest will surely be networking, like you mentioned DD. Again for fixed installations the prospects of a full fiber network with no need for a conversion interface is huge. For a corporate environment, you could now almost revert to a server and terminals situation, with all information being and processed on a central server cluster and the terminals being effectively dumb. Especially for things like call centres this could mean a massive saving in setup and running costs.