IBM Research breakthrough makes tiny powerhouse chips likely
What are the enemies of the perfect laptop computer? Each of us has our own mental list, but heat and power consumption would rank near the top for most of us who want something small, powerful, durable and miserly in using energy.
That nirvana of portable computing just moved closer. A breakthrough using pulses of light in the esoteric field of on-chip silicon nanophotonics was revealed in a paper published by IBM Researchers in the journal Optics Express. A visual overview of the achievement is in this video report.
The result might one day lead to laptop PCs hosting tiny multicore chips with the power of a supercomputer. In today's world, that supercomputer would contain thousands of miniscule processor "brains" connected by thousands of miles of copper wire and use the energy equivalent of powering hundreds of homes. The new chips would expend about the power of a light bulb.
Researchers at the T. J. Watson lab in New York said that using light instead of wires to send information between the cores can be 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires.
The breakthrough — known in the industry as a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator — performs the function of converting electrical signals into pulses of light. The IBM modulator is 100 to 1,000 times smaller in size compared to previously demonstrated modulators of its kind, paving the way for many such devices and eventually complete optical routing networks to be integrated onto a single chip. This could significantly reduce cost, energy and heat while increasing communications bandwidth between the cores more than a hundred times over wired chips.
"Work is underway within IBM and in the industry to pack many more computing cores on a single chip, but today's on-chip communications technology would overheat and be far too slow to handle that increase in workload," said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science and Technology, IBM Research. "What we have done is a significant step toward building a vastly smaller and more power-efficient way to connect those cores, in a way that nobody has done before."
The report on this work, entitled "Ultra-compact, low RF power, 10 Gb/s silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator" by William M. J. Green, Michael J. Rooks, Lidija Sekaric, and Yurii A. Vlasov of IBM's T.J.WatsonResearch Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. is published in Volume 15 of the journal Optics Express. This work was partially supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through the Defense Sciences Office program "Slowing, Storing and Processing Light".
For more information about IBM Research and its Silicon Photonics project, visit: http://www.ibm.com/researchhttp://www.research.ibm.com/photonics
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