Stanford team works to develop speed-of-light network

Engineers at Stanford University have taken a step closer to fashioning silicon chips that could manipulate data at the speed of light, a development that could one day create lightning-fast networks to carry the ever-growing traffic on the Internet.

The group of professors and students say they have demonstrated a way to make a chip from the elements silicon and germanium that can perform the tasks of much bulkier and more expensive optical networking technologies.

“The advantage here is that we are not introducing any new materials into the silicon manufacturing process,” said James Harris, an electrical engineering professor and one of the inventors who published the findings in today’s issue of a scientific journal, Nature.

By Dean Takahashi

Mercury News

Full Story: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/13009069.htm