IBM touts "supercomputer-on-a-chip"

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 7 Dec 2007 at 12:38

IBM has joined Intel in the race to link multiple cores through light rather than wires, a technology which could dramatically increase the processing power of future chips.

The technology uses an optical modulator to convert electrical signals into pulses of light, which are guided around the chip via silicon waveguides, tiny slithers of silicon 200 times smaller than a human hair.

According to Big Blue, removing the need for copper wiring will allow chip makers to place hundreds or thousands of processor cores together on a wafer, effectively putting "a supercomputer on a single chip", to use its much hyped phrase.

The challenge in transferring data using light rather than electronic signals lies in directly fabricating the necessary lasers in silicon. The discipline is known as silicon photonics and has been a major focus of research by rival Intel over the last few years.

That research led to an announcement by Intel in July, when an engineer posted on his blog that he had developed a "laser modulator that encodes optical data at 40Gb/sec," placing IBM's 10Gb/sec achievement somewhat in the shade.

Intel first announced a successful hybrid-silicon laser in 2006.

IBM claims 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."

Speaking on the applications for the technology, Michael Loughran, Communications Manager for IBM's research department told PC Pro.

"This kind of computer capacity can create extremely powerful laptop instruments that may be used in everything from mobile biological laboratories to video games that render virtual worlds in three dimensions for a fully immersive experience."

However, he warned not to expect anything too soon.

"This is currently still a long-term research project. A reasonable time to expect photonics to appear on a microprocessor chip would be somewhere in the 10 to 15 year range. However, some specialised silicon-based photonic devices integrated with CMOS electronics are likely to go to the market much sooner, for example, components for active cables or telecommunications."