The chipmaker Intel aims to revolutionize our ways of communication by using a new technology to create very high performing optical devices.

The new technology is called Silicon Photonics and it uses standard silicon to send and receive optical information among computers and other electronic devices.

Intel researchers have made a new breakthrough in this filed by achieving world-record performance using a silicon-based Avalanche Photodetector (APD). The silicon-based APD is a light sensor that achieves superior sensitivity by detecting light and amplifying weak signals as light is directed onto silicon.

This APD device used silicon and CMOS processing to achieve a “gain-bandwidth product” of 340 GHz - the best result ever measured for this key APD performance metric.

Thanks to this technology, Intel could have a viable solution for future bandwidth needs of data-intensive computing applications such as remote medicine and lifelike 3-D virtual worlds.

Also, silicon photonics will provide substantial size, cost, and power savings over traditional optical communication solutions.

This advance builds upon previous Intel breakthroughs such as fast silicon modulators and hybrid silicon lasers.

This new achievement opens the door to lower the cost of optical links running at data rates of 40Gbps or higher and proves, for the first time, that a silicon photonics device can exceed the performance of a device made with traditional materials.