Sun Microsystems has received $44 million in funding from DARPA to work on a way to connect multiple silicon chips using lasers instead of traditional wires.

Wires are a major bottleneck in multi-chip systems today because they slow down the rate at which the chips can communicate. Sun is now aiming to fix that problem by switching out the wires for tiny lasers. The company believes that if successful, the new technology could allow the chips to work up to a thousand times faster.

Unfortunately, Sun is only giving the project a 50% success rate, so we may not be seeing tiny lasers inhabiting our computers any time soon. Hopefully they can get it done though, because as Alan Huang says, “This would be a way of breaking Moore’s Law,” and we’d love to see some blazing-fast computers in the near future. [via New York Times]

Sony has unveiled a new technology that promises to greatly increase hard drive capacities, even in laptops. Instead of a traditional magnetic read/write head, Sony’s new drives will use a hybrid of magnetic and optical technology allowing for a much greater density of data on the disk.

Much of the hard drive will remain the same. The most significant change is that data will now be written to the disk using a laser. Lasers are much more precise than magnetic heads, allowing them to squeeze many more bits into a given area - 5 times more, Sony claims.

This development will result in some huge hard drive sizes. A 320GB drive today would turn into a 1.6TB drive using the new technology while the size and other factors remain the same. Sony’s development will be a relief to laptop users who are already running out of room on their hard drives. There is no timetable for release set as of now, but we hope Sony pushes this technology out soon. We’d love to see terabyte hard drives in our laptops.

“If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory.” [U-M]

That sounds pretty damn intense alright. The laser, dubbed HERCULES, takes up several rooms and contains 300 terawatts of power. To put that into perspective, think 300 times the capacity of the entire US power grid.

What does HERCULES do with all of that power? If focuses it into a 1.3 micron speck about 100th the diameter of a human hair, of course. Scientists believe that intense beams like this could help them develop better ways to treat cancer, among other applications.

HERCULES is a titanium-sapphire laser. Light fed into it bounces like a pinball off a series of mirrors and other optical elements. It gets stretched, energized, squeezed and focused along the way.

It all sounds pretty cool, but use is very limited for an uber-laser like this. We hope some good research comes out of it (and that nothing gets blown up of course).