IBM unveils laser-based chip technology

ARMONK, USA: IBM scientists today unveiled a new chip technology that integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon, enabling computer chips to communicate using pulses of light (instead of electrical signals), resulting in smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips than is possible with conventional technologies.

The new technology, called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics, is the result of a decade of development at IBM's global Research laboratories, said a press release.

IBM said the patented technology will change and improve the way computer chips communicate — by integrating optical devices and functions directly on to a silicon chip, enabling over 10X improvement in integration density than is feasible with current manufacturing techniques.

IBM anticipates that Silicon Nanophotonics will dramatically increase the speed and performance between chips, and further the company's ambitious Exascale computing program, which is aimed at developing a supercomputer that can perform one million trillion calculations — or an Exaflop — in a single second.

An Exascale supercomputer will be approximately one thousand times faster than the fastest machine today, said IBM.

“The development of the Silicon Nanophotonics technology brings the vision of on-chip optical interconnections much closer to reality,” said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science and Technology, IBM Research.

“With optical communications embedded into the processor chips, the prospect of building power-efficient computer systems with performance at the Exaflop level is one step closer to reality,” he added.

In addition to combining electrical and optical devices on a single chip, IBM said the new technology can be produced on the front-end of a standard CMOS manufacturing line and requires no new or special tooling. With this approach, silicon transistors can share the same silicon layer with silicon nanophotonics devices.

To make this approach possible, IBM researchers have developed a suite of integrated ultra-compact active and passive silicon nanophotonics devices that are all scaled down to the diffraction limit — the smallest size that dielectric optics can afford.

“Our CMOS Integrated Nanophotonics breakthrough promises unprecedented increases in silicon chip function and performance via ubiquitous low-power optical communications between racks, modules, chips or even within a single chip itself,” said Dr. Yurii A. Vlasov, Manager of the Silicon Nanophotonics Department at IBM Research.

He said the next step is to establishing manufacturability of this process in a commercial foundry using IBM deeply scaled CMOS processes.