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posted by chromas on Monday April 23 2018, @05:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the lit-bits dept.

A new microchip technology capable of optically transferring data could solve a severe bottleneck in current devices by speeding data transfer and reducing energy consumption by orders of magnitude, according to an article published in the April 19, 2018 issue of Nature.

Researchers from Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California Berkeley and University of Colorado Boulder have developed a method to fabricate silicon chips that can communicate with light and are no more expensive than current chip technology.

The electrical signaling bottleneck between current microelectronic chips has left light communication as one of the only options left for further technological progress. The traditional method of data transfer–electrical wires–has a limit on how fast and how far it can transfer data. It also uses a lot of power and generates heat. With the relentless demand for higher performance and lower power in electronics, these limits have been reached. But with this new development, that bottleneck can be solved.

"Instead of a single wire carrying around 10 gigabits per second, you can have a single optical fiber carrying 10 to 20 terabits per second—so a thousand times more in the same footprint," says Assistant Professor Milos Popovic (ECE), one of the principal investigators of the study, whose team was previously at University of Colorado Boulder where part of the work was done.

"If you replace a wire with an optical fiber, there are two ways you win," he says. "First, with light, you can send data at much higher frequencies without significant loss of energy as there is with copper wiring. Second, with optics, you can use many different colors of light in one fiber and each one can carry a data channel. The fibers can also be packed more closely together than copper wires can without crosstalk."

Source: http://www.bu.edu/eng/2018/04/18/a-new-era-of-microelectronics/


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Monday April 23 2018, @09:39PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Monday April 23 2018, @09:39PM (#670896) Journal

    distance isn't really an issue until you go 20 inches and/of a few connectors away.

    RF signals in conductors present an entirely different set of challenges as compared to optical paths; we're up against those limits right now, only incrementally nudging them here and there. CPU speeds are not increasing very quickly at this point, and adding 2D area to a CPU chip – which deals with internal distances far less than 20" – tend to not speed it up... quite the contrary. Optical rates and signal modulation densities are far, far in excess of what we can do in what is effectively a wire, be it an oxide path or conventional copper, etc., and if - for instance - an output bit in a CPU could talk to a bit in something else much faster without dealing with a significant inductive load (the wire and its coupled impedances), that would be a significant gain, one worth a whole waxload of candles. Likewise, if input got there at Terahertz rates instead of gigahertz rates... that's a serious win.

    If. :)

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