IBM Researchers: chip design advance

Project Seeks to Replace Copper Wires With Lasers and Tiny Silicon Circuits; Intel and Universities Have Similar Efforts
By PAUL GLADER And DON CLARK


Researchers at International Business Machines Corp. are claiming an important advance that could change the way computer chips communicate, sharply boosting speed while lowering energy consumption. The goal is to use pulses of light rather than copper wires to exchange information between chips—and to build the needed components out of silicon rather than costly, esoteric materials.


IBM's advance involves a key component called an avalanche photodetector, which converts light into electricity. The researchers say they used silicon and the element germanium to create a photodetector that is among the fastest and least power-hungry of its kind. They are publishing their findings in the scientific journal Nature. IBM isn't alone in the pursuit. Researchers at universities and companies including Intel Corp. and start-up Luxtera Inc., have also been working on improving chip performance using silicon-based optical components.


"This is the next wave of computing," said Richard Doherty, an analyst at market-research firm Envisioneering Group and a patent holder in optical communications. "By 2020, it may be the dominant way Google, governments, banks and other large users are doing their computing." Optical communications involve encoding information on streams of light particles generated by lasers. The technology uses thin glass fibers rather than bulky cables, yet creates connections that allow more data to flow at higher speed.

Such benefits are the reason long-distance phone wires were replaced with fiber-optic cables, a technology developed in the 1970s. Companies like Luxtera already sell silicon-based optical devices for linking up computers. Researchers are racing to miniaturize optical components so they can be built into microprocessors.


Intel has built a series of optical components from silicon and related materials, including a prototype avalanche photodetector it announced in December 2008. IBM says its version can detect 40 gigabits of data a second—four times the speed of Intel's—and operates at 1.5 volts rather than 30 volts. "That can save a huge amount of power," said Yurii Vlasov, the lead scientist on the IBM research. He said IBM's photodetector can detect weak pulses and amplify them without adding unwanted noise, a previous problem with the technology.


Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's photonics technology lab, called IBM's advance another sign of progress in the field. "As a scientist, I think this is all great," he said. "It just drives more competition."


Mr. Vlasov said it could be five years until the technology makes its way into chips for high-end server systems. It could take another five years before it is used in consumer products such as cellphones, he said.

* TECHNOLOGY
* MARCH 4, 2010

IBM: IBM scientists Fengnian Xia, Yurii Vlasov and Solomon Assefa were part of the team behind the research.

As impressive as the chip is, I love this picture: a Chinese, a Russian, and  an Ethiopian; that the US at its best.

Judge Keeps His Word

Todd Heisler/The New York Times - From left, Mr. Wu’s mother, Floren Wu-Li; his sister Jenny Gong; and his fiancée, Anna Ng. Mr. Wu, 29, an executive who came here at age 5, faces deportation for muggings when he was 15.

The judge and the juvenile had grown up on the same mean streets, 40 years apart. And in fall 1996, they faced each other in a New York court where children are prosecuted as adults, but sentenced like candidates for redemption. The teenager, a gifted student, was pleading guilty to a string of muggings committed at 15 with an eclectic crew in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The judge, who remembered the pitfalls of Little Italy in the 1950s, urged him to use his sentence — three to nine years in a reformatory — as a chance to turn his life around.

“If you do that, I am here to stand behind you,” the judge, Michael A. Corriero, promised. The youth, Qing Hong Wu, vowed to change.

Mr. Wu kept his word. He was a model inmate, earning release after three years. He became the main support of his immigrant mother, studying and working his way up from data entry clerk to vice president for Internet technology at a national company.

But almost 15 years after his crimes, by applying for citizenship, Mr. Wu, 29, came to the attention of immigration authorities in a parallel law enforcement system that makes no allowances for rehabilitation. He was abruptly locked up in November as a “criminal alien,” subject to mandatory deportation to China — the nation he left at 5, when his family immigrated legally to the United States.

Mr. Wu with his fiancée. When he was jailed last fall, he reminded Judge Corriero of his old promise to stand by him.

Now Judge Corriero, 67, retired from the bench, is trying to keep his side of the bargain. “The law is so inflexible,” said Judge Corriero, now executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City and the author of “Judging Children as Children: A Proposal for a Juvenile Justice System.” The 2006 book calls for a justice system that reduces future crime rates by nurturing those who can learn from their mistakes, instead of turning them into career criminals.

That was his aim, he said, when he presided over the special court known as the Manhattan Youth Part, his views shaped by his own childhood. The son of a longshoreman and a factory seamstress, he grew up in a tenement across the street from the Tombs — the Manhattan House of Detention — and was schooled by both Roman Catholic missionaries in Chinatown and the Mulberry Street Boys. While he avoided serious trouble, he saw how easily a careless choice could lead to culpability instead of accomplishment.

Police Chiefs: Overhaul Immigration Policy

Chief John Timoney of Miami


Seeking to inject their views into the revived debate over immigration overhaul, several big-city police chiefs urged Congress on Wednesday to draft a new policy that improves public safety by bringing illegal immigrants out of the shadows.

Sensible.

The chiefs — updating recommendations made in 2006 by the leaders of more than 50 urban police departments — called for an overhaul that would integrate immigrants into the legal system, possibly with driver’s licenses, and separate the local police from immigration enforcement.
Have the federal government accept responsibility for a national policy?

Chief Timoney, Chief Art Acevedo of the Austin Police Department in Texas and former Chief Art Venegas of the Sacramento Police Department said local law enforcement had been undermined by the blurred line between crimes and violations of immigration law, which are civil.
Congress has avoided dealing with the issue, and by doing so they have shifted the burden to local law enforcement, including the costs.
Those who call illegal immigrants “criminals,” they said at a news conference here, are misreading the law and hurting their own communities by scaring neighbors who could identify criminals. “When you remove the emotion from the debate,” Chief Acevedo said, "no one can argue that it is in the best interest of public safety to keep these people living in the shadows.”

Emotion is what mucks everything up.

They said they favored tough border enforcement and efforts to prosecute employers who rely on illegal foreign-born workers. But they insisted that local law enforcement be kept apart from immigration enforcement because such agencies lacked the training and time, especially with recent budget cuts.

Another efect of the economic slowdown.

Jessica M. Vaughan, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tougher immigration enforcement, said the chiefs were misguided.

The motto of the organization? Pro-immigrant, low-immigration think-tank which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted.

The costs for local police are often minimal, Ms. Vaughan said, because the federal government pays jailing costs, and verifying immigration status can be done in conjunction with standard checks of criminal databases. Immigrants are less likely to report crimes, she added, because of language barriers, a lack of understanding about American law, and a general distrust of authority stemming from corruption in their home countries.

So the police don't understand what is really happening, but a think-tank analyst does. O, sure.

“None of this is related to fear of deportation,” she said.

Huh? It is corruption of law enforcemet in their home countries that afflicts immigrants

Emanuel Now a Backer of Immigration Action

While Mr. Emanuel once predicted that comprehensive immigration reform wouldn't be considered until the second term of a Democratic president, he now says conversations on the issue will begin this year to lay the groundwork for possible action in 2010. The issue is also likely to arise next week when President Barack Obama travels to Mexico to meet with President Felipe Calderón.

For his part, Mr. Emanuel said his views haven't changed, though people may be viewing him in a new light now. In any case, he said, his job now was to represent the president's views.

"It doesn't matter what Rahm thinks," he said in an interview. "It matters what President Obama thinks."

Mr. Obama, who pledged during his campaign to act on immigration, won with strong support from Latino voters. While Democrat John Kerry won 53% of the Hispanic vote in his 2004 run, Mr. Obama took 67% in 2008.

Numbers speak loudly.

A bridge to somewhere

This a fascinating story. Human contact and international cooperation and understanding are victims of the fear, immigrant-bashing and xenophobia so prevalent these days. This man wants to resist such nonsense.

SIERRA BLANCA, Texas – In a swampy corner of his desolate ranch, Bill Addington proudly flouts the law.

Good for him.

The Department of Homeland Security has demanded that he tear down a rickety footbridge from his land across the Rio Grande into Mexico. Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, authorities have shut down nearly a dozen of these informal river crossings along the Texas border. This is the last they know to be operating. They want it gone. Mr. Addington refuses.

Now that's great. How many terrorists are going to use that rickety little bridge 90 or so miles east of El Paso?

He crossed that bridge countless times as a boy, darting into Mexico to buy candy or watermelon juice or to flirt with the girls at church-hall dances. Mexicans crossed over, too, every day, to work the cotton fields for Mr. Addington's father – a U.S. Border Patrol agent. After a hard season's labor, they would all celebrate together with a night of bilingual poker, fueled by whiskey and calf-brain stew.

How ironic. His father was a wetback.

"They say it's a new era, but their vision of the border is a place of fear and trouble," he says. "We just don't see it that way. This is our home."

Common sense. Not something bureaucrats know.

He grew up on the river, soaring out over the international border on a tire swing, splashing in the lazy current, frying fresh-caught catfish with his Mexican buddies on one shore or the other. Border life has a unique culture and rhythm, he says, and he can't stand to see it locked down behind steel fencing. Or cut off by destroying a footbridge.

That's a point that is not often discussed, nor, I confess, one I thought of: making the border a garrison disrupts normal life, destroys culture.

The local sheriff, Arvin West, backs him up. Sheriff West believes that security imperatives will one day require the bridge to close. He acknowledges that it can enable illegal immigration -- in fact, his own grandfather used it to sneak into this country. But Mr. West says the bridge is hardly a threat and calls it ridiculous for the government to target a flimsy string of two-by-fours when miles of border remain unsecured. So for now, he vows to stand "toe to toe and nose to nose" against any federal official who tries to shut down the crossing.

The sheriff's grandfather crossed into the US on that bridge, and now the grandson is a law enforcement officer. Gives lie to the argument of cutting off immigration, no? Yes.

The letter from Homeland Security did contain a vague threat of unilateral action: "Our goal is to work...in a peaceful and cooperative manner," it read, "...however, we cannot allow your bridge" to remain open.

Mr. Addington shrugs off the warning. He'll take that risk, he says, for his friends across the border, for his fellow ranchers who rely on day laborers from Mexico, for the memory of those dances and the long evenings after the cotton harvest, when people from two nations bonded over barbecue.

"We should be building bridges, not walls," Mr. Addington says. "I'm not taking it down."

An Interpreter Speaking Up for Migrants

In 23 years as a certified Spanish interpreter for federal courts, Erik Camayd-Freixas has spoken up in criminal trials many times, but the words he uttered were rarely his own. Then he was summoned here by court officials to translate in the hearings for nearly 400 illegal immigrant workers arrested in a raid on May 12 at a meatpacking plant. Since then, Mr. Camayd-Freixas, a professor of Spanish at Florida International University, has taken the unusual step of breaking the code of confidentiality among legal interpreters about their work.

His conscience made him break out from the shell of impartiality.

He said defense lawyers had little time or privacy to meet with their court-assigned clients in the first hectic days after the raid. Most of the Guatemalans could not read or write, he said. Most did not understand that they were in criminal court.

And the legal system seems in a hurry to criminalize these people. Illegal? Undocumented, yes. Yet all they want to do is work, and will take jobs no one else will take.

Frothing Over a Starbucks in Little Colombia

A piece of local interest. What does the arrival of a Starbucks in Jackson Heights mean? Does it portend something? I know JH some; at times I go for street food vendors. And to catch the 7 train to Manhattan.

Little Colombia. Colombian food isn't very good; too much starch and meat, not much spice. And I say this as a Colombian-born man. Yes, it can be good, but overall, not my favorite. One good thing is Colombian coffee. Café con leche, without sugar, for me.

A line did catch my attention: Tara Darrow, a Starbucks spokeswoman, said the company, in choosing where to open branches, does not base the decision on “incomes or types of people there,” but rather, “We choose based on where we know people will welcome us and where we can be part of the community.” What a crock.