The Hindu : Front Page : Super chip moves IT optically

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 17, 2007
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Super chip moves IT optically

Special Correspondent

Electrical signals can be turned into light beam

RIDING A LIGHT BEAM: This highly magnified image of a silicon chip showing the two vertical tracks or waveguide, 200 times thinner than a human hair, along which the light flows to carry signals from core to core.

Bangalore: Like a highway sign that says ‘No Entry,’ semiconductor designers may soon face the end of the road on the electric pathways used to move signals inside a computer chip. As they slide into the multi core era — where one slab of silicon might well house 2, 4 and soon 8, separate processing cores — they are grappling with a pressing problem: How to build the copper rails that carry the signals between the cores thin enough to squeeze more and more transistors on a computer chip. Even Intel co-founder Dr. Gordon Moore, whose “Law” predicted the doubling of chip complexity every two years, doesn’t give current technology more than a decade, before it faces a physical roadblock.

Which is why last week’s announcement by IBM, of a breakthrough in swapping copper rails for an optical waveguide is causing some excitement in the semiconductor industry.

A waveguide is the optical equivalent of a pair of railway lines — it forces an optical beam to stay within the guide. IBM engineers reported in the journal Optical Express that they had succeeded in converting the electrical signals of today’s microchips into beams of light. Since these can much, much, finer than the thinnest copper rail, they believe this will allow chip makers to put, not just dozens, but hundreds, of separate cores on a single processor, all simultaneously attacking the task at hand. Even the waveguide carrying all these beams would be 200 times thinner than a strand of human hair.

First hurdle

In other words, the first hurdle to creating a supercomputer in a box, maybe even on a single chip, seems to have been crossed. But please don’t rush to order one any time soon.

The researchers say practical systems that deploy optical waveguides within silicon chips, are at least a decade away.

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