Intel will be holding the first public demonstration later today (Tuesday) of an electrically pumped hybrid silicon laser, enabling terabit per second optical links over a network.

Described as a major breakthrough in being able to build cheaper integrated lasers, the company said it would play an important role in future tera scale computing (TSC) environments.

Kevin Kahn, senior fellow at Intel, said: “The future is in tera scale computing and computing is going to be heavily parallel. This will be achieved by having many cores that are working together. In the past we talked about [TSC] in terms of the processor, but the problem is bigger than that – it extends to the platform and the network.”

The company is working on problems around getting the lasers onto silicon die, and Kahn said he was optimistic that the work would come to fruition in four to six years.