Will "Intel Inside" still be there after the electronic chips get replaced by the all-optical chips? Any comments?
Short-term all microelectronic chip companies are going to struggle a bit. As the feature size goes down and down in a quest for higher and higher speed, so it does the net income. Most money is spent on buying more and more sophisticated tools.
Long term, this should change as Intel (from yesterday's announcement and other information available in tech journals) is positioning itself as a front runner in the development of the new all-optical chips. If Intel continues to develop the integrated optics chips, "Intel Inside" will still be inside most of computers (and used for so many other high speed telecom applications).
I was very surprised to see that yesterday series of announcements have not "excited" anyone. Non tech people (and the financial gurus for that matter) apparently have no idea about integrated optics, much less about all-optical computers, and why they are so badly needed.
Forget for now about the whole range of other applications. Lets only talk about higher (and I mean much higher) speed chips. People are screaming for much faster, lower power computers.
They ("we the People") will want to access any cultural or sporting events on-line, much the same we do it with word data right now. Say you wish to see (whenever you want) a show from Moulin Rouge in Paris, or the super bawl, or whatever. You'll need much higher speed than electronics will ever be able to provide (even if III-V semiconductors such as GaAs or InP are used instead of Si).
The RC of the electronic microchips (due to the combined resistance of all those wires connecting those near 1 Billion components, and the relatively high-q dielectrics that separate those components), introduce delays and the only way to increase the speed is to reduce the combined length of the wires, and further reduce C. This means the critical dimensions of the components have still to go down a lot, and the number of components has to be further increased (up to 10 Billion proposed on that small area chip), on an even smaller chip area.
The all-optical chip development will not happen overnight, but I can assure you it will happen much sooner than many people realize (including some experts in the semi business). And yesterday announcements based on that article in Nature is a very important step in that direction. It looks like “Intel Inside” will be there for many decades (the way the electronic chip already did) after the electronics chip gets extinct.
Mike
