IBM opto-electronic breakthrough may shrink supercomputers

Stephen Withers
Friday, 07 December 2007 09:37

Your IT - Home IT

The idea of replacing some of the pathways within computers and other digital devices has been around for some time. Such an arrangement could reduce energy consumption (and therefore waste heat) while dramatically increasing the available bandwidth. A new development by IBM researchers may have brought such products closer.

The breakthrough claimed by IBM's Watson Research Center is a greatly improved modulator, which converts electrical signals into light pulses.

Researchers have succeeded in making a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator that is between 100 and 1000 times smaller than previously demonstrated devices of this kind.

"We believe this is a major advancement in the field of on-chip silicon nanophotonics," said Will Green, the lead IBM scientist on the project.

"Just like fibre optic networks have enabled the rapid expansion of the Internet by enabling users to exchange huge amounts of data from anywhere in the world, IBM's technology is bringing similar capabilities to the computer chip."

Currently, multiple cores on a single chip are connected electronically. Dual and quad core processors are commonplace, and the IBM Cell processor used in the PlayStation 3 has nine cores.

While there is potential to put more cores on one chip, the bottleneck is the communications pathways between them.

"Work is underway within IBM and in the industry to pack many more computing cores on a single chip, but today's on-chip communications technology would overheat and be far too slow to handle that increase in workload, said TC Chen, vice president, science and technology, IBM Research.

"What we have done is a significant step toward building a vastly smaller and more power-efficient way to connect those cores, in a way that nobody has done before."

According to IBM officials, the new modulator has the potential to allow the development of chips that have the processing power of today's supercomputers yet only use as much power as a light globe.