The company said it had developed way to convert electrical signals into pulses of light. The breakthrough means a chip uses pulses of light through silicon instead of electrical signals on wires.
In addition to putting the extraordinary power of a supercomputer into a single, notebook sized machine, IBM said the breakthrough had obvious benefits of drastically lower power consumption and reduced heat.
He breakthrough would also mean dramatically lower cost, while increasing speed and performance between cores by more than 100 times.
“While today’s supercomputers can use the equivalent energy required to power hundreds of homes, these future tiny supercomputers-on-a-chip would expend the energy of a light bulb,” IBM said in a statement.
In a paper published in the journal Optics Express, the IBM researchers detailed a significant milestone in the quest to send information between multiple cores – or “brains” – on a chip using pulses of light through silicon.
The breakthrough – known in the industry as a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator – performs the function of converting electrical signals into pulses of light.
The IBM modulator is 100 to 1,000 times smaller in size compared to previously demonstrated modulators of its kind, paving the way for complete optical routing networks to be integrated onto a single chip.
“Work is underway within IBM and in the industry to pack many more computing cores on a single chip, but today’s on-chip communications technology would overheat and be far too slow to handle that increase in workload,” said IBM Research vice-president for Science and Technology, Dr T.C. Chen.
“What we have done is a significant step toward building a vastly smaller and more power-efficient way to connect those cores, in a way that nobody has done before,” Dr Chen said.
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