IBM unveils integrated photonic computer technology
IBM has unveiled a new chip technology that integrates electrical and optical devices on the same silicon die, paving the way for computer chips that communicate with light instead of electrical signals. This yields devices that are smaller, faster and more power efficient than devices fabricated using conventional technologies. The new technology, called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics (CISN), is the result of a decade of development activities in IBM’s global research laboratories. It is expected to change and improve the way computer chips communicate, by integrating optical devices and functions directly on silicon chips, enabling over tenfold improvement in integration density. IBM anticipates that CISN will open the door to exascale computing with supercomputers that can perform one million trillion floating-point operations (1 exaflop) per second. An exascale supercomputer would be approximately 1000 times faster than today’s fastest machines.In addition to combining electrical and optical devices on a single chip, the new technology can be implemented on the front end of a standard CMOS fabrication line and requires no new or special tooling. This allows silicon transistors to share the same silicon layer with silicon nanophotonics devices. To make this possible, IBM researchers have developed a suite of integrated ultra-compact active and passive silicon nanophotonics devices, all of which are scaled down to the diffraction limit View the Original article
