#CHIPS: "IBM debuts CMOS silicon nanophotonics"

Silicon chips will be communicating with pulses of light instead of electrical charge starting in 2011, according to International Business Machines Corp., which described its CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics (CISN) technology Wednesday (Dec. 1) at a tradeshow. Look for silicon photonics to become an everyday part of every semiconductor makers high performance computing efforts over the next five years. R. Colin Johnson, Kyoto Prize Fellow @NextGenLog


IBM's all silicon optical transceivers house modulators, wave guides, wavelength-division multiplexers, switches and detectors all cast the same CMOS die.

Here is what my EETimes story says about silicon photonics: At Semicon Japan in Chiba, Japan, IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) heralded silicon nanophotonics as the enabler for future exascale processors that can execute a million trillion operations per second (1,000-times faster than today's petascale supercomputers)... By integrating electrical-to-optical and optical-to-electrical transceivers onto traditional CMOS chips, silicon photonics promises to break the bottleneck now holding back development of exascale computing platforms. IBM now claims to have solved this problem with its CISN technology which is currently being licensing to partners, and which will begin to appear in commercial transceivers starting in 2011...
Full Text: http://bit.ly/NextGenLog-hBbm