At a conference in the US, IBM has demonstrated what it claims to be the first fully integrated wavelength multiplexed silicon photonics chip. This is a big step towards commercial computer chips that support both electrical and optical circuits on the same chip package, and ultimately the same die. Optical interconnects and networks can offer much higher bandwidth than their copper counterparts, while consuming less energy—two factors that are rather beneficial as the Internet grows and centralised computing resources continue to swell.
Engineers have long known that fibre-optic links are more desirable than copper wires for shuttling data around—the available bandwidth is higher, the distances that signals can be squirted over are longer, and energy consumption is lower. On the other hand, when it comes to actually doing stuff with that data, electronics are where it's at. This dichotomy has resulted in a very pronounced split between optical and electrical technologies: optics are used for networking between computers, but inside the chassis it's electronics all the way.
This approach has worked well so far, but as bandwidth and energy requirements continue to soar, research labs around the world have been looking at ways of bringing the optics ever closer to the electronics. The first step is to bring optical channels onto the motherboard, then onto the chip package, and ultimately onto the die so that electrical and optical pathways run side-by-side at a nanometer scale.
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