New chip may revolutionize digital world

Feb. 12, 2004, 6:42AM

New chip may revolutionize digital world
New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Intel scientists will announce today that they have built a prototype of a silicon chip that can switch light on and off like electricity, blurring the line between computing and communications and bringing sweeping changes to the way digital information and entertainment are delivered.

For the first time, Intel researchers said, they have shown that ultra-high-speed fiber optic equipment can be produced at the equivalent of low-cost personal computer industry prices. Industry executives said the advance could lead to commercial products by the end of the decade.

As the cost of communicating in cyberspace falls, the researchers said, existing barriers to creating fundamentally new kinds of digital machines capable of far greater performance, and not limited by physical distance, should disappear.

The advance, described in a paper to be published today in the journal Nature, suggests that Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is on the verge of developing the technology to move into lucrative new telecommunications markets.

"Before, there were two worlds— computing and communications," said Alan Huang, a former Bell Labs physicist who founded Terabit, an optical networking company in Menlo Park, Calif.

"Now they will be the same, and we will have powerful computers everywhere."

The advance, scientists and industry executives said, should free computer designers to think about the systems they create in new ways, making it possible to conceive of machines that are not situated in a single physical place.

It will also make possible a new class of computing applications to transmit high-definition video to homes hundreds or even thousands of times as fast as over today's Internet.

One potential application, Huang said, would be an interactive digital television system allowing viewers to watch a sports event from several angles, moving the point-of-view at will while the game is being played. With only a limited number of digital cameras, it might be possible to synthesize a virtual "seat" movable anyplace in the stadium. Such a feature now exists in video games, but is far beyond the capacity of today's digital TV systems.

Building laser communications into computer chips also points to effective solutions to the so-called "last mile" challenge of delivering digital information from the Internet to homes and offices — creating extremely fast, low-cost computer networks and drastically lowering the barriers to knitting together powerful servers and supercomputers based on multiple processors.

Intel's chip is the prototype of a high-speed transistor-like device to encode data onto a light beam that the company has now refined to send more than 2 billion bits of digital information a second. The device, called an optical modulator, makes it possible to switch a tiny laser beam on and off and direct it into an ultra-thin glass fiber.

Although the technical report in Nature focuses on the device, it is only one component of a communications system that Intel says that it will demonstrate at its annual developer conference in San Francisco next week by transmitting a movie in high-definition video over a five-mile coil of fiber optic cable.

With this breakthrough, Intel researchers said, they have shown that it should be possible to build optical fiber communications systems using Intel's process, without resorting to either the exotic materials or hand-assembly techniques that are now the standard in the fiber optic networking industry.

 

Some other interesting news about the internet:


F.C.C. Begins Rewriting Rules on Delivery of the Internet
By STEPHEN LABATON

Published: February 12, 2004


WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 — The Federal Communications Commission began writing new rules today that officials and industry experts said would profoundly alter both the way the Internet is delivered and used in homes and businesses.

In one set of proceedings, the commission began writing regulations to enable computer users to gain access to the Internet through electric power lines. Consumers will be able to plug their modems directly into the wall sockets just as they do with any garden variety appliance. Officials said the new rules, which are to be completed in the coming months, would enable utilities to offer an alternative to the cable and phone companies and provide an enormous possible benefit to rural communities that are served by the power grid but not by broadband providers.

In a second set of proceedings, commissioners began considering what rules ought to apply to companies offering Internet space and software to enable computer users to send and receive telephone calls.

A majority of the commissioners suggested that the new phone services should have significantly fewer regulatory burdens than traditional phone carriers. The agency also voted 4-to-1 to approve the application of a small Internet company, Pulver.com, asking that its service of providing computer-to-computer phone service not make it subject to the same regulations and access charges as the phone carriers.

Industry experts say that neither the phone service nor the broadband delivery systems offered by electric companies will take any sizable market share for at least the next two years. But in moving forward with the new regulations, they said the agency was reducing regulatory uncertainty and encouraging major companies and investors to make investments in the new technologies to enable them to move to market more quickly.

The F.C.C. chairman, Michael K. Powell, and his two Republican colleagues on the commission said the agency's decisions on the two sets of rules and the Pulver application would ultimately transform the telecommunications industry and the Internet.

"This represents a commitment of the commission of bringing tomorrow's technology today," Mr. Powell said. He added that the rules governing the new phone services were intended to make them as ubiquitous as e-mail, and at possibly a significantly lower cost than traditional phones, since the services would have lower regulatory costs.

A Republican commissioner, Kathleen Q. Abernathy, said that the agency and industry "stands at the threshold of a profound transformation of the telecommunications marketplace" as more companies — including such giants as AT&T and Verizon — move from circuit-switching phone technology to Internet-based technology.

But one Democratic commissioner, Michael J. Copps, raised objections to the Pulver petition and questioned the underlying themes of deregulation in the two rulemaking proceedings. He said that they had set the agency on a course that could effectively rewrite the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and make it easier for the incumbent phone companies to escape necessary regulation.

Mr. Copps also criticized the majority of the commission for rejecting a request by law enforcement agencies that the F.C.C. first work out the legal and technical problems in monitoring phone calls over the Internet before granting Pulver's application or considering new rules for the Internet-based phone services.

"I believe it is reckless to proceed, and I cannot support this decision at this time," he said of the Pulver application. "The majority apparently prefers to act now and fix law enforcement issues later — along with universal service, public safety, disability access and a host of other policies we are only beginning to address."

Mr. Powell replied pointedly to Mr. Copps's criticism that the agency was rewriting the Telecommunications Act by offering a new deregulatory climate that the old phone companies might seek to take advantage of.

"We can talk about rewriting the Telecommunications Act," he said. "But the Telecommunications Act is nine years old and it is being rewritten by technology."