Both the Mercury News and the New York Times are reporting that engineers at Stanford University have built a silicon germanium modulator which can manipulate a beam of laser light on and off up to 100 billion times a second. This discovery is very important because the materials used, silicon and germanium, are already common in the semiconductor industry. This potentially opens the way to optical networks ten times faster than today's networks which can transmit data at a rate of 10 gigabits per second. But keep in mind that such networks are still years away. Read more...
Sources: Dean Takahashi, Mercury News, October 27, 2005; John Markoff, The New York Times, via CNET News.com, October 27, 2005; and various web sites
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