IBM ‘silicon nanophotonics’ breakthrough integrates optical and electrical circuits
December 10, 2012
Cross-sectional view of an IBM silicon nanophotonics chip combining optical and electrical circuits. A photodetector (red feature on the bottom left side of the cube) and modulator (blue feature on the bottom right side of the cube) are fabricated side-by-side with silicon transistors. Silicon nanophotonics circuits and silicon transistors are interconnected with nine levels of yellow metal wires. (Credit: IBM)
IBM announced today a major advance in the ability to use light instead of electrical signals to transmit information for future computing.
The breakthrough technology — called “silicon nanophotonics” — allows the integration of different optical components side-by-side with electrical circuits on a single silicon chip using, for the first time, sub-100nm semiconductor technology.
Silicon nanophotonics takes advantage of pulses of light for communication and provides a “superhighway” for large volumes of data to move at rapid speeds between computer chips in servers, large datacenters, and supercomputers, thus alleviating the limitations of congested data traffic and high-cost traditional interconnects.
“This technology breakthrough is a result of more than a decade of pioneering research at IBM,” said Dr. John E. Kelly, Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research. “This allows us to move silicon nanophotonics technology into a real-world manufacturing environment that will have impact across a range of applications.”
The amount of data being created and transmitted over enterprise networks continues to grow due to an explosion of new applications and services. Silicon nanophotonics, now primed for commercial development, can enable the industry to keep pace with increasing demands in chip performance and computing power, IBM said.
Information superhighways inside an IBM Silicon Nanophotonics chip (credit: IBM)
Businesses are entering a new era of computing that requires systems to process and analyze, in real-time, huge volumes of information known as Big Data.
Silicon nanophotonics technology provides answers to Big Data challenges by seamlessly connecting various parts of large systems, whether few centimeters or few kilometers apart from each other, and move terabytes of data via pulses of light through optical fibers.
Building on its initial proof of concept in 2010, IBM has solved the key challenges of transferring the silicon nanophotonics technology into the commercial foundry.
By adding a few processing modules into a high-performance 90nm CMOS fabrication line, a variety of silicon nanophotonics components such as wavelength division multiplexers (WDM), modulators, and detectors are integrated side-by-side with a CMOS electrical circuitry. As a result, single-chip optical communications transceivers can be manufactured in a conventional semiconductor foundry, providing significant cost reduction over traditional approaches.
IBM’s CMOS nanophotonics technology demonstrates transceivers to exceed the data rate of 25Gbps per channel. In addition, the technology is capable of feeding a number of parallel optical data streams into a single fiber by utilizing compact on-chip wavelength-division multiplexing devices.
The ability to multiplex large data streams at high data rates will allow future scaling of optical communications capable of delivering terabytes of data between distant parts of computer systems.
Further details will be presented this week by Dr. Solomon Assefa at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in the talk titled, “A 90nm CMOS Integrated Nano-Photonics Technology for 25Gbps WDM Optical Communications Applications.” Additional papers being presented by IBM at IEDM can be seen here.
Additional information on the project can be found at http://www.research.ibm.com/photonics.
Comments (10)
by John Miller
Right on time! Awesome.
by Bri
As I remember, the light used can be of different frequencies. This means that you could have multiple levels of information at the same time. So it’s not just the speed difference, but also the multiplexing possibilities. There are a lot of frequencies that can be pulse modulated at the same time. As we get into multi sensory communication for telepresence, we are going to need these photonic breakthroughs. This has the potential to make bandwidth explode. Once this becomes readily available, it will open the door for some amazing capabilities.
by Whittaker
Truly exciting news. Thanks for sharing.
by Mr.X
@ Whittaker: “Truly exciting news. Thanks for sharing.”
Could you please explain -for the sake of those among us who are not as technically adept- why exactly this is a truly exciting breakthrough?
Of course, the word “breakthrough” implies that a certain amount of excitement/appreciation is appropriate.Would that I could…;)
Thanks in advance (for sharing).
by Kay Rottzweil
It lets components communicate at a higher bandwidth. The SATA cables inside your computer use copper I believe, but with this you could use fiber optics instead. Also you might be able to outsource components like RAM and hard drives into the cloud with a low latency fiber optic connection.
by melajara
This is simply solving, in an utmost elegant way, a thorny issue in IT, I/O bottleneck!
See e.g. this (dated) article http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/technology/features/article.php/3856121/IO-Bottlenecks-Biggest-Threat-to-Data-Storage.htm
This achievement will tend to reequilibrate the entire computer stack. Besides, it’s yet another step toward the holy Grail, computing with photons instead of electrons, with no resistance anymore and no Joule effect i.e. (over)heating ;-)
by Rowe764
Since a computer system’s processing speed is pretty much bound by the speed at which you are able to move data to the processor for it to work on, any kind of bottle neck that exists between that processor and the data becomes an enormous issue when you start getting into Big Data.
In other words, if I had a processor that was able to read a book and then do something with whatever that book contained, you wouldn’t want to give that processor a problem that required it to read 5,000,000 books and then have a person like me fetching and carrying each book 1 at a time from another room to the processor – that would take forever.
What IBM is trying to do is take the current speeds at which data can be retreived from storage and moved to the processor and make it many times faster than what is currently possible.
By integrating light-based communication channels into the current chips, you are basically replacing an analog phone line with fiber optics right on the chip itself.
Hope that helps :)
by Tom
“Since a computer system’s processing speed is pretty much bound by the speed at which you are able to move data to the processor for it to work on”
is true only for centralized processing. Distributed processing and highly interconnected parallel processing is an improvement on that, though we’re not very good at making computers that way, yet, although getting better all the time.
The improvements in transmission velocity and bandwidth, and reduced joule effect will enhance both centralized AND distributed processing, at all scales.
Next will be quantum coupled particle trasmission with effectively zero transmission time, and bandwidth orders of magnitude over optical transmission, at all scales.
by Mr.X
@Tom: Thanks for your comment!
by Mr.X
@ Kay, Mel and Rowe:
Thanks for all your explanations.They are greatly appreciated.