Sun wants to replace wires with lasers for faster computing

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]