IBM optical interconnection technology breakthroughs in silicon photonic commercial shortly

Scientific research strength very strong IBM announced today at the optical signals to replace the signal transmission of information to make a major breakthrough. After more than 10 years of R & D, ” Silicon nanophotonic ” ( Silicon Nanophotonics ) finally using 100nm the following process, in a single silicon chip at the same time the integration of a variety of different optical components and electronic circuit, for commercial paved the last road.

Silicon nanophotonic mainly use the light pulse communication, can with super speed transmission of large capacity data, very suitable for server, data center, the super computer and other high performance computing field, solve the traditional interconnection mode bandwidth bottleneck and the high cost problem.

IBM on optical interconnection technology research has continued for more than a decade, and in 2010 put forward “CMOS integrated silicon nanophotonic ” concept, realize the optical interconnection technology a major breakthrough. Now, IBM has solved this technology into commercial use the key impediments.

IBM through the high performance 90nm CMOS manufacturing process by adding a new module, wavelength division multiplexing ( WDM ), a regulator, photoelectric detector such as a variety of silicon photonic components and CMOS electronic circuit integrated together. In this way, can the traditional semiconductor wafer factory using a standard process for manufacturing single chip optical interconnect transceiver, than the traditional method can greatly save the cost.

In another industry giant Intel IBM challenge, new breakthrough also made a strong response, do not appear Intel worry about complicated problems of manufacturing technology.

This is the IBM 90nm silicon nanophotonic structure diagram, cube left red block is a photodetector, the blue area is the regulator, and the far edge of the red dot is a silicon transistor. Nano silicon photonic circuit and a silicon transistor through the nine layer metal wire ( yellow ) are interconnected together.

IBM said, they found the transceiver test each channel data transmission rate has exceeded 25Gbps, and through the use of compact on-chip WDM equipment, can be a plurality of parallel optical data in a single optical fiber in exile, to achieve ” multichannel ” transmission, the future can be in the far distance calculation system for easy transfer between TB level data.

Of course, we can also see that, IBM this technique more strictly speaking is light and electricity combination, photon is only partially replaced the electronics, and to realize the science fiction in a purely ” photonic computer “, still has very long way to go.