Nano-Scale Optical Co-Axial Cables Announced 157
toybuilder writes "Reuters reports that scientists have published their work on nano-scale optical coax in the most recent issue of Applied Physics Letters. The coax cable is only about 300nm wide, and is able to transmit optical signals using a carbon center conductor, transmitting light at about 90% the speed of light."
Coax is silly for optical (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're using light, there *isn't* any electrical interference, either as a transmitter or a receiver. That's one of the major benefits of using light.
So it's kind of pointless to make a coax, unless you really want a two-channel transmitter where one's a funny ring-shape. In which case, why not make optical ribbon cable?
Which brings up a wholly separate question: one reason industry has moved from parallel to very-high-speed serial is that you don't have to worry about timing and synchronicity, which are primarily due to impurities in copper. Is this an issue with optical? Coz the engineering is generally easier to run ten existing lines in parallel than to make one line ten times faster, if you don't have to worry about synchronizing them.