Processing data at the speed of light

There is, it turns out, a significant difference between sending data at the speed of light and processing that information at the same speed once it gets there.  The telecom industry has struggled with this dilemma in its fiber optic networks for years now. With data streaming at 186,282.397 miles per hour, service providers have to slam on the breaks in order to run the data it through the electronic switches and routers that direct the appropriate signals to their destinations. Similarly, processing data on computer chips using photonic technology is something of an epic race in the PC industry and it looks like Intel is in the lead. The chipmaker achieved a breakthrough in data-carrying light that holds the promise of being able to transmit terabits of data per second on a single chip, by using lasers to increase the bandwidth of interconnects between the components of a microprocessor. Researchers at Intel's Photonics Technology Lab have built a silicon optical modulator that can encode data on an optical beam at 40 billion bits per second. 

Keep up with the latest in these developments:
- see this InformationWeek article