TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Optical Fibers Boost Speed, Cut Weight and Power of Computers

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 12-09-10 | Comments

A switch to optical fibers for communications is under way that will boost the speed while cutting the power and weight of computers. Using the already popular complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process, IBM's new CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics (CISN) process uses optical waveguides instead of copper wires for all interconnection and communications.

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Optical Fibers Boost Speed, Cut Weight and Power of Computers
Optical fibers today are used for high-speed shared connections, such as an Internet service provider's connection to the regional backbone. However, IBM's new CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics (CISN) process seeks to migrate optical communications to connections between servers, between the printed circuit boards (PCBs) inside servers, between the semiconductor microchips mounted on PCBs, and eventually between the cores on a single microchip.

IBM's CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics technology includes all the optical components needed to convert electricity to light and back again, including modulators, wave division multiplexers (WDM) and detectors (Source: IBM).

CISN will affect all electronics users�from supercomputers at large data centers to the tiniest consumer handheld devices�but the process will trickle down from the top. Optical interconnects will eventually become ubiquitous because they solve two of the biggest impediments to the future of computing: namely, increasing speed while lowering their power requirements and weight. CMOS microchips use copper lines to shuttle electrical charge around on-chip, then copper traces on PCBs to interconnect the microchips. From there, communications off-board goes through copper busses that pass data between boards, and then finally the data passes from server to server over even heavier-gauge copper wires.

CISN ditches all the bulky, heat-generating copper interconnections from inside microchips, printed circuit boards and copper wires connecting systems. By replacing the copper with super-lightweight optical fibers, future electronic systems will be faster yet burn much less power and create much less heat than is generated today.

Next: Another Advantage of CISM >>