6. HP labs photonics

Posted on 15 Apr 2009 at 11:42

Data at the speed of light: that's the promise of photonics. At HP Labs, senior fellow Stan Williams, who invented the memristor technology that works like a light switch for speeding up transistors, has now developed a new way to move data more quickly between components.

Photonics uses light on a circuit board instead of copper wiring, which is slower and more prone to errors. Already, fibre-optics is used for networking inside office buildings and datacenters, and to connect one server rack to another. Now, HP hopes to push the technology even further.

"We are just about at the point where we can put photonics in systems," Williams told PC Pro. "In modern datacenters, copper cables are already being replaced by optical systems. As you get inside the rack, however, the amount of data that needs to be moved goes up and you need to keep down costs. We're starting to connect racks together. In a year or two, we'll be testing blades together in a rack - CPU assemblies - using a photonic bus."

Williams calls this "bringing back the bus", and envisions a day when wires will not be used to connect, say, a motherboard to a hard disk. Instead, laser lights would be used (and switched off when not needed to save power) to transmit the data.

This vision of computing seems a bit like the Terminator movies, where data moves over thin lasers and could easily change what we think of as a computer. There would no longer be a simple ATX-sized box: a computer could be housed in a much smaller form factor, or not in a casing at all.

The one major challenge for the project has to do with costs. A single photonics testing device costs $1 million. Nevertheless, that's still a small drop in the vast ocean that is HP's research lab. The company employs 700 researchers on 22 major research projects at its headquarters in Palo Alto, ranging from social networking to RFID chips that are smaller than a fingernail.

Next: 7. Wireless power chargers

Back to "10 amazing research projects"

Author: John Brandon