IBM Unveils Technical Advancements for Supercomputer-on-a-Chip

Technology giant IBM has unveiled a technical advancement in converting electrical signals into light pulses that could miniaturize the size of a supercomputing set-up to a single chip, Reuters has reported.

According to a research published by IBM in the journal Optics Express, it has produced electro-optic modulators, 100 to 1,000 times smaller than silicon photonics modulators, which are small enough to fit on a processor chip. Further, the company discovered that by connecting processing cores on a chip by light instead of wires could by pass the associated problems such as high energy consumption and heat generation. As a result, the efficiency of computing power could be maximized.

IBM further said that it reached a ‘milestone’ in the research to connect hundreds or thousands of processing cores on a tiny chip. As a recent example of this technology, IBM had developed a chip for Sony’s PlayStation 3 games console, which has nine cores connected on it.

According to Reuters, Will Green, lead scientist on the project at IBM said that using light instead of wires to send information between the cores could be as much as 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires. He further said that IBM had used standard industry processes and tools to make the tiny silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulators, which gave the research team confidence to commercialize this technology.

He further said that the future tiny supercomputers on a chip could expend as little energy as a light bulb, which enormously reduce cost, energy, heat, and space required while increasing communications bandwidth. In future this technology could be applied for powerful data analysis in remote locations or for high-resolution three-dimensional image rendering in real time.

IBM’s research team has been working on this project for about five years, which is partly funded by a US government defense research agency.

In another recent miniaturization initiative, IBM developed three-dimensional chips using ‘through-silicon vias’ allowing semiconductors to be stacked vertically instead of being placed near each other horizontally. This technology is expected to cut the length of critical circuit pathways by up to 1,000 times.

Source: ComputerWire daily updates