IBM's new chip technology with optical modules and electronics on a silicon plate.

Dec. 8, 2010 - PRLog -- Following gecmani optical rectifier (germanium Avalanche Photodetector) - a device that can recognize optical signals at a rate of 40GB / s, multiply by 10 times and only works with 1.5 V power supply developed by IBM and released in March, IBM today introduced a new chip technology allows to integrate modules and optical electronics on a single silicon chip which processing speed hits 1 million trillion calculations per second - 1,000 times the processing speed of supercomputers today according to projections.

According to the company, the new technology called CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics (CMOS isn) - roughly translated as metal oxide semiconductor additional silicon integrated optical photons will revolutionize chip’s communication way and improve integrated background density to 10 times compared with the current chip manufacturing techniques by collecting the optical modules and their functions onto a single silicon chip.

This is entirely possible by IBM’s new technology to see a single transceiver channel with all optical and electronic chains encapsulated only in 0.5 mm2 size. This means that the technology allows the manufacturer to produce such single-chip transceivers with 4x4m2 but the size and speed are up to 1 trillion bits (Terabit) per second.

Manufactured on standard CMOS lines:
Besides combining the optical modules and electronics on a single chip, IBM also shows that CMOS ISN technology can be produced in the first step of CMOS’s current standard processing without the necessity of special tools. Thereby, the silicon resistance will have structure equal to the optical photons silicon modules. In order to accomplish this, IBM researchers have developed a package of integrated active and passive lightweight silicon optical photons modules to reduce the size down to diffraction limit - the smallest size that the optical dielectric can be achieved.

IBM says optical communication transceiver chip can now be produced in a standard CMOS instead of assembling from various parts which were built from an expensive semiconductor compounded technology. Thereby, it allows adding more modules to handle CMOS fabrication process and compatible with many different components of the silicon optical photons, such as the modulator, the gecmanium photo detectors and the long-wavelength multiplexing for ultra-compact CMOS analog chain and high-efficiency CMOS digital chain.

Towards exaflop processing speed:
By increasing speed and performance among the chips suddenly, IBM hopes the new technology will play an important role in the exaflop speed computer program which is aimed at the development of supercomputers that can do thousands of million billion calculations per second.

Dr. TC Chen, the Deputy Director of IBM science and technology institute said:"The development of optical photons silicon technology has brought the vision of the optical connections on the chip. With the optical communication embedded into processing chip, the prospect of an energy-saving computer system at the exaflop level performance will soon appear. "

Germanium Avalanche Photodetector  is essentially a optical rectifier device made from silicon and germanium. This device operates based on the avalanche effect, also known as avalanche effect / waterfall effect, which occurs when a photon starting a chain reaction by increasing the number of electrons to create a strong electric current. IBM said the device which developed by a team of their researchers is not only high-speed photodetectors, but also the most energy-saving features.

Specifically, the device can receive optical signals at speeds up to 40GB / s and 10-fold amplification, while the power requirement is only 1.5 V - equivalent to an AA pin. With this outstanding innovation, the chip manufacturing technology will enter a period of transition from electronic to photonic. While the electron transmission can hardly go beyond 100GHz without mention about other factors such as arising heat and reducing stability, the photon transmission technology can suffer higher frequencies many times.

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