How Raj Dutt's FLIP will replace conventional electronics in computing

It is as fast as lightning, it is cool, it is going to change the world as fundamentally as did manned flight and it has been created by an Indian, Raj Dutt... Okay, Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the US Navy chipped in.

We are talking about a new technology called Fully Laser Integrated Photonics (FLIP) which will replace conventional electronics in a whole lot of computing and cut down computing's ever-rising demand for power (Google today already accounts for 1% of US power consumption) by an order of magnitude.

FLIP has been enabled by a breakthrough in the science of materials just announced in the US: Indian American scientist and entrepreneur Dr Birendra (Raj) Dutt along with a top team of researchers at his own company APIC Corporation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University has discovered how to make germanium produce a laser when charged with electricity. This would eventually allow a new breed of microchips to be built on a commercial scale in which pulses of light, called photons, zip at top speed along nano-sized waveguides of the self-same germanium etched into silicon, instead of electrons whizzing around in copper circuits on silicon as in today's chips.