New research into graphene’s potential shows that it could be used to boost the performance of copper wires inside semiconductors. If true, this could clear one of the most significant bottlenecks to modern CPU performance.
IBM and Nvidia have been awarded $425 million by the US Department of Energy to build two brand-new supercomputers that leverage IBM’s Power8 CPUs and Nvidia’s upcoming Volta GPUs. The two computers — Summit, which will be built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Sierra, built at Lawrence Livermore — will have peak performance of around 150 petaflops when they’re completed in 2017-2018.
Engineers at the University of Michigan and Intel have succeeded in creating the first practical, room-temperature polariton laser. The polariton laser is of extreme interest because it requires just 0.004% of the current required by normal lasers, making it a prime candidate for use with on-chip optical interconnects. It is also believed that the polariton laser is the first new practical method of producing coherent laser light since the laser diode debuted more than 50 years ago in 1962.
Applied Materials has found a new way to scale interconnects to smaller process geometries without compromising their effectiveness. It turns out a cobalt sheath can dramatically improve reliability at smaller process geometries.
IBM has become the first company to integrate electrical and optical components on the same chip, using a standard 90nm semiconductor process. Where current interconnects are generally measured in gigabits per second, IBM’s new chip is already capable of shuttling data around at terabits per second, and should scale to peta- and exabit speeds.
The semiconductor industry faces enormous challenges in virtually every field. Thanks to a recent advance in interconnect technology from Applied Materials, we should manage to squeeze a few more years out of the current CMOS process.