Intel Jerusalem is claiming to have set the computing world alight by developing the world's first electrically powered silicon laser, which will dramatically increase the speed with which data is transferred between computer chips. "The speed of computers has improved from year to year but we foresee a bottleneck in the interconnect processing between chips along copper lines [currently in use]," Nahum Izhaky, photonics technology development manager at Intel Jerusalem and head of the Israeli team involved in the project, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. "We have developed a general solution for this which will provide a very fast and much cheaper source of light communication in silicon between chips." "In five to eight years, we will be talking about terabit rather than gigahertz computer speeds and this technology will enable us to transfer data by several thousand times the current rate," he added. The 15-member team from Intel's Jerusalem research and development center partnered with a similar sized R&D team at Intel Santa Clara and researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara to achieve the new concept. Izhaky explained that the use of copper wiring to transfer information would soon present limitations in miniaturizing the wiring, in the ability to transfer information via electrons at a sufficient speed and that it would also develop current-leakage and power consumption issues. "We have therefore come up with an alternative that will open doors for silicon technology and future-generation computers," Izhaky said.