IBM introduced the hybrid chip: silicon photonics in action

Silicon photonics is one of the most promising areas in electronics, which promises a significant reduction in energy consumption and an increase in throughput. This technology allows the creation of electron-optical microcircuits on a single silicon crystal, which allows individual chips to interact via optical rather than electrical signals. The creation of the first working hybrid IC from IBM took about 12 years. Improving the performance of systems with such chips allows you to create much more powerful supercomputers than those that are working now.

Thus, the use of light pulses instead of electrical pulses allows for the rapid transfer of very large amounts of information both within a single chip and between different parts of an electronic computer system. Previously, the corporation was able to create a photon transceiver, which provided the function of multiplexing channels along the light wavelength. Now the company was able to place the chips , made by silicon photonics technology, directly on the processor module.


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Bert Offrain, head of the photonics team at IBM Research - Zurich, together with colleagues from Europe, the USA and Japan, suggests considering chips made using silicon photonics technology along with conventional silicon processors. Manufacturing technology of such chips is also proposed hybrid. The team demonstrated the effective operation of the hybrid chip, which suggests a possible breakthrough in silicon photonics technology. Current designs usually involve the use of an optical transceiver on the edge of the board. But this is not an option, since the transceiver is located far enough from the processor, and system performance is significantly reduced.



Blue lines are optical fibers transmitting information in the form of pulses of light. Orange-yellow structures - copper conductors, which pass high-speed electrical signals. The developers managed to integrate both types of conductors on the same chip .

The development of hybrid microcircuits allows to achieve a multiple increase in the performance of the entire system where such chips are used. The development team was able to develop a method of connecting polymer and silicon light guides, despite the fact that the sizes of such structures are very different.



Computer systems with hybrid chips of this type will be used to work with huge amounts of data, which will allow for analytical calculations, processing data in a matter of seconds. Cognitive computing super-systems will be able to help bring technology and science to a new level. But experts still have to work hard before all this becomes possible.