PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Recent talk about the iPhone getting 3-D head-tracking brings Apple closer to the same fundamental problem plaguing all mobile device vendors: how to increase the overall computing power of the phone without increasing energy consumption?
A new optical chip from MIT researchers may be just the solution. By using light, not electricity, to communicate with memory, researchers think they can increase the amount of data read from memory at lower power. But the real kicker is that these optical chips can be mass-produced using the same equipment used by chip manufacturers today to create conventional processors.
Mobile computing has long been a careful balance between processing power and energy consumption. While today’s chips continue to grow in the number transistors and, hence, power, the transistors have become more energy-efficient. As such, power consumption has changed little.
What does change though is the processor’s need for data. Faster processors require more data from memory; otherwise, their processor power is wasted. Increasing the amount of data transmitted from memory electrically, however, increases power consumption. As such, while the processor’s total power consumption changes little, the percentage of power used for communications has grown and continues to grow.
“At some point, you have to devote all your power to communications. And that point’s not too far off. And then what’s left for computation? Nothing,” says Michael Watts, a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories who’s also working on optical chips.
Optical chips could solve the problem, but they’ve required chip manufacturers to change their fabrication equipment. The optical chip produced by the MIT team, though, uses the existing fabrication equipment used by chip manufacturers. Texas Instruments has already created two such optical chip prototypes.
The key has been a change in how MIT researchers produce the waveguides that control the flow of light within the chip. Normally, waveguides are carved out of a single silicon crystal wrapped in insulation. Today’s manufacturing processes, though, can place insulation around polysilicon, not a single silicon crystal. The MIT researchers built their waveguides from polysilicon instead, enabling them to use existing manufacturing equipment. The TI prototypes used waveguides that were 65 and 32 nanometers. Conventional chips use a wavelength of 240 nanometers.
Other technical challenges have been addressed, and still more remain to be answered before we’re likely to see optical chips. Nevertheless, researchers are already thinking ahead to the real prize—optical memory chips. “The memory’s a much tougher nut to crack because it is such a cost-driven business, where every process step matters,” says MIT professor Vladimir Stojanovic. “Things are a lot harder to change there, and optics really need to be absolutely compatible with process flow.”
But if memory chips could also send data optically to an optical process, power wouldn’t be the only advantage. “If you just focus on the processor itself, you maybe get a 4x advantage with photonics,” Stojanovic says. “But if you focus on the whole connectivity problem, we’re talking 10x, 20x improvements in system performance.”
Testing is still under way on the optical chips. A new batch of chips is due back from TI and another major semiconductor manufacturer this winter. In 2007, the MIT team predicted a marketable chip by 2012.
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