Gizmorama: Life in the tech age

NEW YEAR

The New Year gives us the opportunity to make a New Year's resolution. This can be a good idea. After all, there's a new calendar, new digits to write on your checks, new taxes, new this and that.

A resolution that is to be kept needs to be reasonable. Lose 12 pounds maybe as opposed to 50. Go ahead and loose the 50 if you need to, but keep the goal attainable. The real key to accomplishing anything is to use small goals to accomplish big ones. If a goal is too big, human nature tends to make it less tempting to make progress. Think of telling someone what you have done versus what you are doing. Done is better. You have accomplished.

LIGHT CHIPS

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have come up with an interesting way to make chips talk to each other via light. The chips use fiber technology at a chip level to communicate. This is cool because up until now, communication using light required many discrete components and assemblies.

What this will do for the computer is provide faster highways for bits and at the same time reduce heat and power consumption.

One of the key ingredients is synthetic sapphire. By using optical signals, or simply an unhindered laser beam, the Johns Hopkins researchers believe a signal could move 100 times faster than it does along a metal wire. Also, the opto-electric interface circuits require much less power because the sapphire substrate is an insulating material, not a semiconductor.

Send your comments and questions to ideas@gizmorama.org

GIZMORAMA is taking New Year's Day off. It will return Jan. 2, 2002.