IBM chips: Let there be light signals

From CNET News.com: IBM has achieved a major milestone in making the dream of silicon photonics, in which computer chips send signals of light rather than electricity, into reality.

At the semiconductor industry conference Semicon in Tokyo today, IBM photonics leader Yurii Vlasov is detailing how IBM has created a chip that integrates many of the necessary elements of optical communication between a processor and other devices. Significantly, the design uses conventional rather than exotic chip manufacturing technology, involves very small components, and essentially permits a fiber-optic communication line to be attached directly to a processor.

And more significantly, it's headed for real-world use, a sign that IBM's work is serious. That initial use is in IBM's relatively exotic Exascale project to build a computer that can perform a quintillion mathematical calculations per second--roughly 1,000 times that of today's fastest supercomputers.

"In three to five years, silicon photonics will be the main enabler for that level of computation," said Solomon Assefa, an IBM research scientist and one of the members of the team that developed the chip. And in the years after that, it'll follow the traditional computing industry trend and spread to more ordinary products, he predicted.

IBM's project is called SNIPER--short for "silicon nanoscale integrated photonic and electronic transceiver"--but the company is labeling it with the slightly less ungainly term of silicon nanophotonics. It's been under way for a decade, an indicator of just how difficult it is to develop.

The technology is a breakthrough and shows Big Blue well ahead of competitors such as Intel and Samsung, said Envisioneering Group research director Richard F. Doherty. Much previous work about optical connections involved much larger devices that were separate from the processor itself, he said.

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