IBM scientists have unveiled a new chip technology that integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon, enabling computer chips to communicate using pulses of light instead of electrical signals.
The new technology, called 'CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics', is the result of a decade of development at IBM's global Research laboratories, the company claims.
According to the tech giant, the patented technology will change and improve the way computer chips communicate by integrating optical devices and functions directly onto a silicon chip, enabling what the company asserts is over 10X improvement in integration density than is feasible with current manufacturing techniques.
The company says it anticipates Silicon Nanophotonics will dramatically increase the speed and performance between chips, and further the company's ambitious Exascale computing programme, which is aimed at developing a supercomputer that can perform one million trillion calculations - or an exaflop - in a single second.
An 'exascale' supercomputer will be approximately one thousand times faster than the fastest machine today, IBM notes.
“The development of the Silicon Nanophotonics technology brings the vision of on-chip optical interconnections much closer to reality,” says Dr TC Chen, vice-president of Science and Technology at IBM Research.
“With optical communications embedded into the processor chips, the prospect of building power-efficient computer systems with performance at the exaflop level is one step closer to reality.”
In addition to combining electrical and optical devices on a single chip, says IBM, the new technology can be produced on the front-end of a standard CMOS manufacturing line and requires no new or special tooling.
With this approach, the company notes, silicon transistors can share the same silicon layer with silicon nanophotonics devices, adding that to make the approach possible, IBM researchers have developed a suite of integrated ultra-compact active and passive silicon nanophotonics devices that are all scaled down to the diffraction limit - the smallest size that dielectric optics can afford.
“Our CMOS Integrated Nanophotonics breakthrough promises unprecedented increases in silicon chip function and performance via ubiquitous low-power optical communications between racks, modules, chips or even within a single chip itself,” says Dr Yurii A. Vlasov, manager of the Silicon Nanophotonics Department at IBM Research.
“The next step in this advancement is establishing manufacturability of this process in a commercial foundry using IBM deeply scaled CMOS processes.”
Vlasov explains; by adding just a few more processing modules to a standard CMOS fabrication flow, the technology enables a variety of silicon nanophotonics components, such as modulators, germanium photodetectors and ultra-compact wavelength-division multiplexers to be integrated with high-performance analogue and digital CMOS circuitry.
As a result, he adds, single-chip optical communications transceivers can now be manufactured in a standard CMOS foundry, rather than assembled from multiple parts made with expensive compound semiconductor technology.
In a press statement, IBM says the density of optical and electrical integration demonstrated by its technology is unprecedented - a single transceiver channel with all accompanying optical and electrical circuitry occupies only 0.5 a square millimetre - 10 times smaller than previously announced by others.
“The technology is amenable for building single-chip transceivers with area as small as four by four square millimetres that can receive and transmit over terabits per second that is over a trillion bits per second,” it says.
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