Chip light transmission breakthrough bottleneck: bandwidth density increased 10 to 50 times

The integration of photonic and electronic components of the semiconductor microchip can speed up the data transfer speed, improve performance and reduce power consumption, but by the process of restrictions, has been unable to widely used. In a paper published in the Nature magazine by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Colorado and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that it has successfully used existing CMOS-standard technologies to create an integrated photonic and electronic component Single chip.

According to the HPC Wire website, the 70,000-unit transistor and 850 photonic devices are fabricated on a commercial 45-nm SOI CMOS process and are compatible with existing designs and electronic design tools so that they can Mass production. On-chip optoelectronic transmitters and receivers allow microprocessors and memories to communicate directly with external components via photons without the need for additional chips or device management optics.

The advantage of photonic communication is that data streams encrypted in different light colors can be simultaneously transmitted through a built-in optical waveguide or an external optical fiber and that high-density optical communication packets are transmitted using infra-red wavelengths of less than 1 micron, greatly increasing bandwidth. The new chip has a bandwidth of 300 Gbps per square millimeter, 10 to 50 times that of the current electronic microprocessors.

According to the paper, the process includes a crystalline-silicon layer as a core of a transistor and an optical waveguide and a buried-buried buried oxide layer for separating a silicon-on-silicon wafer from a silicon-handle wafer -oxide layer.

Because the thickness of the buried oxide layer is less than 200 nanometers, which can easily lead to higher waveguide losses, the researchers removed some of the substrates on the chip and found that the processor's functionality was not compromised in order to control light leaks.

In addition, researchers built a silicon germanium photodetector and opted for a wavelength of 1,180 nm as a fiber channel, resulting in a 4.3 dB / cm optical propagation loss. The electro-optic transmitter consists of an electro-optic modulator and an electronically driven modulator. The modulator is a 10 μm diameter, waveguide-coupled silicon micro-ring resonator.

Sadasivan Shankar, a senior fellow at Intel, said the study set a new milestone for the current bottleneck in transistor technology, and the use of optics for chip-to-memory transfer will reduce power consumption and increase clock speed. Future research will focus on demonstrating multi-wavelength communications, improving photonic components and developing new system applications.

Semiconductor technology allows the chip to perform more sophisticated operations, but can not increase the bandwidth of communication between chips. The current chip transmission consumes more power than the chip's power budget of 20%, this new technology not only in the case of low power consumption to improve an order of magnitude chip communications bandwidth, the future may also help to achieve Exascale (Exascale) The operation.

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