“All of a sudden it’s better to have an optical superhighway,” said Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer and executive vice president of research and development for Sun.

Computer scientists have long sought a way to make faster and cheaper computers by making larger chips on a single wafer of silicon, a manufacturing process called “wafer scale integration.” If the Sun researchers’ idea can be proved technically feasible and manufactured commercially, it would be possible to create more-compact machines that are a thousand times faster than today’s computers, the company said. Each chip would be able to communicate directly with every other chip in the array via a beam of laser light that could carry tens billions of bits of data a second.

The Sun researchers acknowledge that their project is a significant gamble.

“This is a high-risk program,” said Ron Ho, a researcher at Sun Laboratories. “We expect a 50 percent chance of failure, but if we win we can have as much as a thousand times increase in performance.”

Last week, the NEC Corporation, the Japanese supercomputer maker, announced that it had made an advance in optical connections between chips that will pave the way for a supercomputer able to reach speeds up to 10 petaflops, or 10 million trillion instructions a second. That is about 20 times faster than the world’s fastest computer.

Sun’s partners on the project are Stanford and the University of California, San Diego, and two silicon photonics firms, Luxtera and Kotura. The Sun bid was chosen over three competing teams from Intel and Hewlett-Packard; I.B.M.; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.