A passing thought about the future of computing and electronics and general (wow, what a long topic)

[Killbat]

I was just looking at the power cord leading into my computer. What happens in there? The eletrical energy is routed around in a certain pattern, that's IT. When (not if) computers go totally optical, the power cord may instead be a fat light pipeline. Maybe your house will have a central light source. Interesting.

 

[Soybomb]

How are you going to power it off light though? You might go to some optical connections inside for the data thats electrical, but you still need juice for the lights, etc

 

[T4NNER]

computers will be extremely fragile too. Shipping costs will be horrible. Thank god for Onvia.

 

[Killbat]

Soy, I'm talking about completely optical, processor(s), storage, etc.
Electricity sucks.

Check this out: Lucent's Lambda router

 

Optical storage may be far in the future.
For now its florensence(sp) and charged molecule transfer and storage. Optical would be a dream though.
But since light is neither wave or particle, how do you contain it and keep data?
Data is constant flux is not good.

 

[Killbat]

Not storing light, using light as the interface i.e. a medium that can be read/written with light, which exists.

 

[JoLLyRoGer]

The whole concept of optical technology is based upon a transmitting unit and a receiving unit. The process is accomplished similar to the way your cable TV works. You have a transmitter made up of various components and a Laser Diode or an LED (Compare this to the cable co.?s central office). Instead of modulating a radio frequency (VHF range 116 to 225 MHz range) you are modulating a light frequency. Since light frequencies (THz range) are much higher that of radio or microwave frequencies (HF/VHF/UHF/SHF), Thousands times more information can be passed on a single carrier frequency due to wider channel spacing (more bandwidth). Fiber Optic acts like the cable carrying the signal from the central office to your TV set, and depending on the type, the diameter of the optical cable varies to accommodate a certain "bandwidth" of light. I.e. infrared vs. red, vs. blue, vs. violet, vs. Ultra Violet. Every color is a different frequency. Incandescent light is a mixture of all of these. That's why you see the different colors when you refract sunlight through a prism. A laser on the other hand produces a single light frequency. If you try to refract a laser through a prism, you get the same color out that you put in. Anyway, on the distant end you have a receiving unit. Typically PIN (Positive Intristic Negative) diodes are used to detect the modulated light signal and convert it to an electrical signal that your receiving unit decodes into usable information (same as the tuner in your TV set). Thus to make a long story short. You can't have fiber optic communication without electricity to power the circuitry that makes it all possible.

Keep in mind I tried to keep this short and simple. The actual theory of operation and engineering behind this technology goes far deeper than this.

JR..

 

[ratkil]

Jollerroger: /dr evil voice rrrriiiiiiggggggghhhhhhhtttttttttt /dr evil voice guess I will go back to play risk now with a splitting headache thanks a lot ........

 

[Mday]

as the size of electronics shrinks, such as our .18 micron (180 nm) processors, and that sucky .15 micron processor and future SMALLER cores, the effects of quantum mechanics becomes very real. and thus there exists a way of bypassing that problem, optical gates. optical gates are REAL! but only in labs. and by optical, i don't mean these wimpy fiber optic connections.

the power cord is a power cord. electricity to power devices is always required. but our data connections (phone cord, or ethernet) will get replaced by fiber optics. look at gigabit ethernet and the 10 gb ethernet. twisted pair is not enough to fully achieve that bandwidth, so we have fiberoptic connections.

the power cord will NOT get replaced by an optical cord. but our data interconnects will most likely go optical for the "external" connections such as networking. that is to say, our "ribbon cables" will still be in use, despite serial ata using less wires, they are still wires.

we won't have a "central light source" instead we will have ONE main data connection, which is optical in nature, coming into our homes for telecommunications (data, audio, video) as well as "wireless" (RF, tv, satellite, whatever). don't envision a gigantic light bulb ;-).

--

and soy, get my name out of that sig.