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Silicon Photonics: Speeding Data Transfer between Computing Resources
New optical chip technology being introduced by IBM enables information to be transferred at speeds as high as 100 Gbps (bits per second). Tests with the chip show that data can be transferred over a two kilometer distance using pulses of light. Compared to standard copper wire, transfer of information using light is considerably faster. The new technology could potentially enable a huge bandwidth of data to be transferable between computing resources.
Silicon photonics technology is currently designed to work over short distances, and it is much cheaper than optical technology used for telecom networks.
Supratik Guha, director of Physical Sciences at IBM Research, said that “we’ve been doing silicon photonics research since 2000 because we understand all the opportunities they have for processing data. We believe our efforts will result in the first marketable chip to put CMOS and silicon photonics on the same chip.”
Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director of IBM Research, said that “making silicon photonics technology ready for widespread commercial use will help the semiconductor industry keep pace with ever-growing demands in computing power driven by Big Data and cloud services. Just as fiber optics revolutionized the telecommunications industry by speeding up the flow of data — bringing enormous benefits to consumers — we’re excited about the potential of replacing electric signals with pulses of light. This technology is designed to make future computing systems faster and more energy efficient, while enabling customers to capture insights from Big Data in real time.”
