Intel, UCSB Build Hybrid Silicon Laser

Chip maker Intel Corp. said Monday that its researchers, along with UC Santa Barbara, had built the world’s first electronically powered hybrid silicon laser using standard silicon manufacturing processes.

This development, the company said, addresses “one of the last major barriers” to making cheaper, high-bandwidth silicon devices to use with computers and data centers.

The researchers combined the light-emitting properties of indium phosphide with the light-routing capabilities of silicon into a hybrid chip -- which for now is “still far from being a commercial product,” the company said.

Silicon is widely used to mass-produce digital electronics. It can also be used “to route, detect, modulate and even amplify light but not to effectively generate light,” the company said.

Indium phosphide-based lasers, meanwhile, are widely used in telecommunications equipment, but the need to individually assemble them “has made them too expensive to build in the high volumes and at the low costs needed by the PC industry,” Intel said.

The technology could “help make possible a new era of high-performance computing applications,” said Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s Photonics Technology Lab, in a statement.

Intel shares rose 14 cents to $19.65.