Sun's wireless chips to fire data transfer

Researchers at Sun Microsystems have paved way for computer chips to communicate with each other that could ultimately result in integrated circuit boards being obsolete.

The technology, called "proximity communication," aims to let one chip transmit signals directly to another next to it, instead of the tangle of pins, wires and circuit boards employed today. If successful, the technique could greatly alter many aspects of computer design.

Using a technique called 'capacitive coupling', Sun engineers have been able to transfer data between components at 21.6Gbps -- about half the speed of the 800MHz front side bus on Intel Corp's latest Pentium 4 microprocessor, "without even trying," said John Gustafson, a principal investigator with Sun Labs.

The rate at which data can be transferred between components like the computer's memory and processor, has increasingly become a bottleneck for the computer industry as the silicon and wires connecting computer components have simply not been able to transfer data as quickly as new components can process it.

What it means is that it could accelerate chip performance because the speed of transferring data among chips and the number of channels for the transfers would increase. The other advantage includes reduced energy consumption and more importantly, since this enables tracking and replacing defective chips, the overall costs could also come down.

According to Robert Drost, a senior researcher at Sun Labs, who presented his paper at the IEEE conference," There is a huge need for higher-bandwidth kind of chips. Rather than have the chips soldered onto a printed circuit board, the printed circuit board is taken out of the system."

The project is part of a supercomputer Sun is creating for the $50 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative and is competing against IBM's Cray in the project. In about two years, DARPA will select one of the three entrants to develop its machine further.

The rate at which data can be transferred between components like the computer's memory and processor has, increasingly, become a bottleneck for the computer industry as the silicon and wires connecting computer components have been unable to transfer data as quickly as new components can process it.

However, proximity communication is expected to provide long lasting solution to this problem. Gustafson predicted that within a few years, the Sun Labs team could achieve much faster transfer rates using this technique. "We could do up to a trillion bits per second, in and out of a chip, which starts to match the speed of the computer," he said.