The race to marry silicon and lasers took an interesting turn when a small chip firm managed to outsmart Intel.

Luxtera doesn't even have its own fab but has managed to build the ultra-fine conduits needed to send fast data successfully into silicon using lasers. This bypasses all the expensive fibre optic connection kit currently needed, and opens up fibre speeds of 10Gbps to many more people.

For those of us who can remember the excitement at finally getting a modem that could manage 10Kbps these are heady times. There's a way to go yet but the first steps are being taken.

One side-effect of the announcement is that Intel is going to be stepping up its research. The chip giant has been spending a lot of time shifting to multi-core processing and it'll be interesting to see if it has kept up with other projects as well.

One suspects that the lights were burning late last night in Intel's labs.

30 Mar 2005