LONDON IBM researchers have described a Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator, built in silicon, that they claim is 100 to 1,000 times smaller in size compared to previously demonstrated modulators of its kind. IBM goes on to claim the development could pave the way to multiprocessing chips with optical routing networks for the transmission of information.
The Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator, described by IBM researchers in the journal Optics Express, performs the function of converting electrical signals into pulses of light, IBM said. However, IBM did not indicate how soon on-chip optical communication might be deployed in commercial chips. The reduced size supports reduced cost, energy and heat while increasing communications bandwidth between the cores more than a hundredfold over wired chips, IBM said.
The report, entitled "Ultra-compact, low RF power, 10-Gbit/s silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator” by William M. J. Green, Michael J. Rooks, Lidija Sekaric, and Yurii A. Vlasov of IBM’s T.J.Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. is published in Volume 15 of Optics Express.
"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 T.C. Chen, vice president of science and technology at IBM Research, in a statement. "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 nobody has done before."
IBM’s Cell processor contains nine cores on a single chip. The optically-based transmission technology aims to enable a power-efficient method to connect hundreds or thousands of cores together on a chip. Using light instead of wires to send information between the cores can be as much as 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires, IBM said.
"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, in the same statement. "Just as fiber 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."
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