By the researchers in the us for the first time within the microprocessor integrated circuit chips into photonic components, for the creation of a high-speed low-power processor exploration via computer.
The processor USES the simplified instruction set computer (RISC - V) architecture, contains more than 70 million transistors and 70 million photonic components, and it is within an existing chip factory production, show relevant technology and existing production process can be compatible.
The study by the university of California, Berkeley, MIT and the university of Colorado at boulder researchers in cooperation. Project expert says, the above is a rectangular microprocessor chips, the size of each side of the 3 mm and 6 mm respectively, which photon components as input/output port.
"This is a milestone," the university of California, Berkeley, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science department vladimir Norwich stowe and said, because "this is the first to use light to realize with the outside world (data) communication processor".
Optical communication compared with electronic communications, has a large bandwidth, low power consumption advantages. Optical communication has greatly improve the data communication between the computer and the computer, the computer network communication, but the efficiency of the introduction of computer or computer microprocessor chips inside is not easy.
Commercialization of large-scale complicated electronic integrated circuit manufacturing technology, equipment is expensive, so the researchers focus on reducing in the chip is introduced into photonic components needed to increase costs, and may lead to incomplete defective rate. So, they're etched ring modulator, light detector, vertical coupler as much as possible when using photonic components such as silicon germanium transistors, the characteristics of polysilicon and single crystal silicon layer with the transistor body ACTS as a waveguide.
The researchers in the UK a paper published in the journal nature, said, run a variety of computer programs, according to the results of the chip data communication bandwidth per square millimeter 300 billion bits, the equivalent of existing on the market, "pure" electronic communications within the microprocessor bandwidth of 10 to 50 times.
Test results showed that the chip a photon input/output port of power consumption is 1.3 per bit tiny joule, namely 1 million bits data consumes only 1.3 watts of power. In addition, the photon input/output port send and receive data in the experiment of distance is 10 meters, and high-speed electronic data transmission distance limit line is about 1 meter.
According to the researchers speculate that the low consumption of photon input/output port is expected to be used by "data center", and this kind of data centers tend to consume a lot of power, and the power consumption is likely to continue to increase rapidly. In accordance with the natural resources defense council, all data centers in the United States 2013 total cost about 91 billion KWH electricity, equivalent to the overall power consumption of about 2% of the year.
In 2015, the microprocessor integrated circuit chip into photonic component technology application prospect has spawned two start-up companies in the United States, one of the researchers with the university of California, Berkeley, and its associated directly.
