The MSNBC article has some snippets of info, but I’m not fully clear (technologically) on exactly why this is such a big deal. Can someone elaborate a bit?
Intel reports milestone in silicon laser use
Technology expected to drive down optical network costs
Because it’s made out of silicon instead of some more exotic semiconductor material, like aluminum-gallium-arsenide or some such. Silicon is cheap, easy to work with, and we have gobs of silicon wafer fabs all over the planet. The other materials are much more trouble.
I wonder if it opens the way to using things like optical transistors and pushing data around on-chip with photons instead of electrons; I would think there would be some advantages to doing that.