IBM has developed a technology for producing electro-optical chips on conventional 90nm equipment
IBM has been developing optoelectronic chips for more than 10 years, combining conventional semiconductors and optical elements — modulators, waveguides, and multiplexers — on a single chip. If earlier it was only about prototypes created in laboratory conditions, now we managed to create a nano-optical transmitter on an almost standard production line using a 90nm process technology with minor modifications. This means that mass production of chips with optical buses for communication between the processor and memory or various processor units between themselves can be established soon.
IBM nano-optical chip under the microscope. The orange areas are copper, the blue ones are waveguides.
The prototype contains 50 transmitters operating in parallel, each of them transmits or receives data at a speed of 25 gigabits / s, the total throughput is 1.25 terabits / s. This technology can be scaled up to peta- and exabit speeds, because optical signal transmission is devoid of many electrical problems - much less attenuation and heat generation, higher modulation speed, it is possible to use spectral channel compression.
First of all, such devices will be in demand when creating supercomputers, where the capacity of communication channels between computing nodes has long been a bottleneck. Soon, such devices will be used everywhere - the use of practically standard technology allows us to confidently say that the price of chips with optical buses and interfaces will be slightly higher than normal, because all optical elements are created simultaneously with semiconductors, on the same conveyor.
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Optics has already supplanted copper at long distances, and is pushing it at average - in data centers, multimedia devices, and the "last mile." Thanks to cheap optoelectronic elements, it can very soon penetrate inside computers and chips. The illustration below shows the concept of using optical communication lines in Network-on-chip (NOC) class systems, which are becoming more relevant with the increasing number of processor cores and the movement of an increasing number of devices to a single chip with a processor.
IBM nano-optical chip under the microscope. The orange areas are copper, the blue ones are waveguides.
The prototype contains 50 transmitters operating in parallel, each of them transmits or receives data at a speed of 25 gigabits / s, the total throughput is 1.25 terabits / s. This technology can be scaled up to peta- and exabit speeds, because optical signal transmission is devoid of many electrical problems - much less attenuation and heat generation, higher modulation speed, it is possible to use spectral channel compression.
First of all, such devices will be in demand when creating supercomputers, where the capacity of communication channels between computing nodes has long been a bottleneck. Soon, such devices will be used everywhere - the use of practically standard technology allows us to confidently say that the price of chips with optical buses and interfaces will be slightly higher than normal, because all optical elements are created simultaneously with semiconductors, on the same conveyor.
')
Optics has already supplanted copper at long distances, and is pushing it at average - in data centers, multimedia devices, and the "last mile." Thanks to cheap optoelectronic elements, it can very soon penetrate inside computers and chips. The illustration below shows the concept of using optical communication lines in Network-on-chip (NOC) class systems, which are becoming more relevant with the increasing number of processor cores and the movement of an increasing number of devices to a single chip with a processor.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/162067/
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