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Date: 1st Dec 2010
IBM learns the trick of tweaking silicon
for photon emission to scale up the computing
Modulating the light rather than electrical signal offers
significant advantages both off-silicon (chip) and on-silicon
in electronics systems. It cuts down the complex routing
of copper/metal interconnects on a nanometer scale semiconductor
device. It also reduces electromagnetic interference of
high speed signal across data buses. With on-chip light
emitting abilities silicon based chips can be pushed further
in handling the signal speed and also the opto-component
integrated silicon semiconductor devices can be made using
a present semiconductor manufacturing process.
R& D labs of Intel, IBM and many top notch universities
are working hard to make silicon to emit photons. It's quite
a challenging subject with Silicon properties not falling
in the line of compound semiconductor materials which are
used in opto and RF Semiconductor domain. But there is no
limit for innovation.
IBM has announced a patented technology called Silicon Nanophotonics,
where optical devices and functions are integrated in a
single silicon based semiconductor device. IBM says this
tech enables over 10X improvement in integration density
than is feasible with current manufacturing techniques.
IBM eyes growth of super-fast Exascale computing by using
optical transceiver integrated semiconductor chips. With
this kind of chips, supercomputers can perform far better
and also in smaller formfactor. Overall cost of supercomputers
can come down.
IBM has ensured by using this technology high speed semicon
chips can be manufactured using the standard CMOS semiconductor
manufacturing equipment without any special tools, that
way the chips can be sold at low cost when they are made
in volumes.
The release from IBM says 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
analog and digital CMOS circuitry.
Finally it's the road towards supercomputer in a chip.
Once it is achieved the word 'supercomputer' may loose its
meaning.
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