More from the “Moore’s Law Can’t Die” department today from Ars Technica’s Chris Lee:

One of the main barriers to reducing the size of optical components is the wavelength of light. Visible light has a wavelength of around 500nm, so devices that manipulate light, like lenses and waveguides, must have comparable sizes. At least up until now—a long-awaited development has now provided a proof of principle, demonstrating that lasers can be made as small as 50nm, sizes that are comparable to current electronic features.

So, we now have 50nm laser hardware, which could conceivably be combined with nanowires to start developing optical circuits that really do look like electronic circuits (e.g., small and cheap). This laser was powered by a very powerful pump laser, meaning that it’s only small if you ignore the enormous power supply. But that was a side effect of how the experiment was put together. A single spaser used about 20 microwatts of power, so much smaller pump sources are feasible. If they can achieve continuous wave operation, the researchers are on to a winner.

Yesterday we talked about IBM’s ten year plan for DNA computers – this experiment comes from the science journal Nature, so it’s even further afield than IBM’s DNA  computing technology, and is purely theoretical at this point.

It is pretty well thought out and interesting, and represents a breakthrough in optical technology.  The bottleneck seems to be power requirements, which until breakthroughs occur within electricity conversion tech, could limit the applications to supercomputer and cloud applications.

It’s something to keep on your radar, and could represent how traditional microchip methodologies could keep pace with the more esoteric emergent computing technology.