IBM Advances the Use of Light Instead of Wires for Chips

[czar7474]

welcome to the future.

[plasticbudgie]

sounds like Gay ben

[bloodhive]

oh , is this how they will control those who take on the RFID chip in their arm or head?

[stuartrockin]

I'll take a patatoe chip... AND EAT IT

[TiagoTiagoT]

Hm, put together the processing power and the ability to route lasers at high speeds, this probably could allow for some kickass trully holographic glassless 3d screens!

For each pixel you would have a tiny lens with a highres tiny laser screen behind, so each pixel actually emits the correct color for all possible angles you can look at itt

Though i dunno if those tiny lasers would be bright enough for the job.

[vrshowdown]

it starting to look like the circuits in Data's head from star trek.

[kyle3420]

@vrshowdown haha no not even close :P

[valery431]

First, you need a simple flip-flop show!

[Ecurrie84]

This is the earliest form of teleportation, if you type in Michio Kaku Teleportation you will see him talking with a man that says one day teleporting things will be possible and that at the moment only information has been sent to somewhere else! that is exactly what this is.

[JesusMiddleEastGuy]

I start believe in magic

[joelito101]

I can see the Fry's Thankgsgiving sales: "Get your 3Thz(terra hertz) Processor for $199 now". I'll be able to play call of duty with real blood splatter turned on now.

[telesniper2]

This is three years old.  Where's the product?? I smell FUD.

[xRHYDDERCHx]

When it will be on our PC's?

[fattymole123]

WOW! 100x bandwidth and 1000's of cores?!?! This is going to be pretty unreal, however something leads me to believe that even though the technology will be available soon, it won't be available to public for quite a while.

[dragas2]

Next logical step because electron data transfer is reaching limits. Imagine desktop processor running at 100ghz heh,

[renekenshin6573]

It won't be long before IBM introduces the first state of the art IBM laptop supercomputers :D

Give's me shivers O_O

[greenzx9r]

The info says it uses ten times less power. This is impossible. That would be a negative number. If it uses less power then it uses a FRACTION of the power. TEN TIMES is not a fraction. One tenth is though which im sure is what he means.

[tycoonpratik]

Optical waveguides.... C00L. Photonics is what Electronics was.

[studentoflife01]

LOL That's not all they have ;)

[darrenc12pdg123]

i dont see how anyone else like intel would have discovered this out its basic technology well available- fibre optic broadband for example i cant wait until our computers are than fast but they will nedd some serious super cooling

[andycourgette]

Basic idees maybe, however not that easy to implement in CMOS technology ..and no, no serious super cooling is necessary. These optical connection will be less power consuming than high-speed electronics ..at least that is the goal!

[splendorfulguris]

how are we going to hand solder this shit?

[metabog]

You won't. By the time this will be out the common person will be so out of the loop with science, this tech will be indistinguishable from magic. We already use something similar to this (but not on this scale), it's called an optoisolator.

[omegakurt20]

first will every technology in the future by opticle? second what powers and opticle circuit? would it still be electricity? answers to these questions will be much appreciated

[zume]

i believe the future contains a 100% glass computer, that pretty much runs on daylight. when the sun goes down, the computer sleeps. when the sun is up, light goes into the glass pc and reflects/refracts/melts in various ways. something like that. reflecting images on a really small scale is where its at. technically, the smallest glow worm could power a computer run on light.

[omegakurt20]

interesting, but wouldn't you want you computer to work in the night time as well?

[zitzelman3]

lol i dont think he likes night time

[bodmondude]

I dont even know how you managed to say something remotely positive about his comment.. It made me lose a couple IQ points and now i'm mad :(

[metabog]

Those are lasers, so you still need electrical power to power the system, I guess. What this refers to is only the way to information is transferred to between components of the chip, on a very tiny scale. You won't have visible lasers running between your hard drive and motherboard instead of a cable, but the chips on your motherboard will have light running between transistors. At least that's how I understand it.

[dartplayer170]

@metabog Why not? The cabling can be replaced by fiber optic cables. less E/M transmission, more security.

[54spiritedwill54]

awesome!!! everyone buy IBM stock now

[asdfhjklbkn]

thank u...got my seminar topic..

[KonanDoul]

Why can it be 100 times faster? the transmition speed of electric pulse in wires is (roughly) only square root of 2 times slower than the light speed.

[mattmak54]

Its not b/c of any large diff. in how fast digital "pulses" travel in a waveguide vs a wire, but the total aggregate bandwidth possible using 1 optical waveguide. e.g. we can easily transmit 20 diff. optical wavelengths,each carrying data at 10 Gbps, down 1 waveguide,for a total aggregate data rate of 200 Gbps.Electrical interconnects today operate at approximately 2 Gbps on 1 electrical wire.They're limited in going faster b/c of long distances & power required to push the signals down the wire

[KonanDoul]

Thank you, mattmak54. An optical fiber has a higher data carrying capacity than electric wire,so the processor can handle more signals at a time,thus the operation rate is higher, in that sense it is faster.

But is not this feature commonly used in fiber-optical communication? What's new in IBM's technology then?...

[KonanDoul]

It seems they still use an electro-optic modulator, which has the highest modulation frequency around 10GHz to date as far as I know. That means each channel's transmitting rate is limited to 10Gbps. Or maybe their emphasis is power consumption? I knew some technology using photonic crystal in place of conventional silicon crystal can greatly reduce power consumption. Other existing technologies include resonant EOM, Mach-Zender Interferometry EOM.

[grandechelon]

i guess it's not about speed but about frequency the greater the frequency the more power you need plus the the pricier the chips but with photons you get all the bandwith you need (in fact even more than you want) with considerably less power requirements todays silicon technology allows to shrink the transistors for 7 to 12 years at the rates we have seen over many years and that's it no progress can be made without entirely new technology so photonic chips seem to be the only solution

[KonanDoul]

Thank you,grandechelon. Why "the greater the frequency the more power you need", is it because Power = (Voltage^2) x (Capacitance) x (Frequency)? But if they still use an electro-optic modulator as the gate, this law should always stand even they use light pulse in transmission instead.

[KonanDoul]

Except for a resonant EOM, whose energy consumption doesn't depend on frequency.

[MJGrindboy]

OMG I didn't understand a word of you explanations. I suddenly feel really dumb :(

[shadowoflightvideo]

@MJGrindboy

Light is used instead of transistors, what's not to understand?

I'm sure it must have a few downsides too.

[Nyocurio]

@shadowoflightvideo I don't think you can simply use light instead of transistors. The light here isn't doing any computation, but simply aiding communication of different processing cores.

[shadowoflightvideo]

@Nyocurio

Sure you can!

In fact, they already managed to do so at a decent speed.

( about 1GHz last time I checked )

All transistors do is going on and off, so does the light signals.

This reduces some heat as well.

So far they haven't reached the speed of todays standards with processing power. ( not that I'm aware of )

[Nyocurio]

@shadowoflightvideo ok provide me with a link or something and I'll believe you. But you DO know how transistors work don't you? That "going on and off" is way more complicated to realize than it sounds. Since respective light rays can't effect each other physically in any way I'm curious as how it should work.

[shadowoflightvideo]

@Nyocurio

These are called optical processors.

Just search google for optical processor ( cpu ) and I'm sure you find some.

I don't think it has much use ( yet ) as the other components are slower.

If the basic components have each a equivalent amount of speed, this could very well mean a very powerful computing experience.

But it probably have some downsides too.

[Nyocurio]

@shadowoflightvideo

well, I read some articles and the Wikipedia one, and came to the conclusion that I was partly right after all. What these optical cpus do is use light instead of elect. current, the base of TRANSMITTING information, not COMPUTING it. A transistor is a part that controls flow of elect. current by another current. Opt. cpus need "light transistors" that do the same with light, because light alone won't compute anything.

Some downsides would be heavy power consumption for e.g.

[ProtonRocket]

@Nyocurio Please, do not refer to wikipedia. Wiki is not a scientific reference. Not in my country.

[Nyocurio]

@ProtonRocket umm that's why I read several other non-wiikipedia articles to cross-check?

[ProtonRocket]

@Nyocurio That's great. It would be better if only papers. :D

[Nyocurio]

@ProtonRocket you do however realize that for most things on wikipedia sources are properly provided, right? And if not, they end up getting tagged with "not backed up with external sources" pretty quick.

[ProtonRocket]

@Nyocurio Yes, I do realize that, thanks to the response. But not all the sources are accessible, and some of them are from internet informational websites, which have less value to a scientifc discussion. Is wiki a international reference to a solid work? I don't think so, and even when some articles are well based and written, you lose credit when you mention as a reference. This is what my teacher of scientifc methods said three years ago, I belive in what she said.

[zume]

Good point and all, but try using punctuation, man.

[dartplayer170]

@Konan You're talking only about speed of electrical charge. In telecom we are talking about bandwidth. It is not just the speed of one pulse but how much information can be transmitted in a given time.

[djExprice]

I want one of these for my birthday!

[einmarmor]

electronics will be finally replaced by Photoelectronics.

[theuncanspan]

EIN-stein

[hoolerprime]

I am curious as to what that input electrical signal says.... :P

[thiswaythat]

I'm too sexy for this code, too sexy for this code, I'm too sexy!! LOL

[hoolerprime]

HAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA

You just made my day!

Cheers!

[bill3rdshift]

@thiswaythat Funniest thing I've heard all day!!

[grandechelon]

wow! way to go IBM let's hope this technology will be utilized soon in pcs i wonder what intel and amd have to say about that

[dan13l305]

awesome!!! everyone buy IBM stock now!!!!