The
electronic-photonic processor chip communicates to the outside world
directly using
light, illustrated here. The photo shows the packaged microchip
under
illumination, revealing the chip’s primary features.
(Image by Glenn J.
Asakawa, University of Colorado, Glenn.Asakawa@colorado.edu)
(December 23, 2015)
Engineers have successfully married electrons and photons within a
single-chip microprocessor, a landmark development that opens the door to
ultrafast, low-power data crunching.
The researchers packed two processor cores with more than 70
million transistors and 850 photonic components onto a 3-by-6-millimeter chip.
They fabricated the microprocessor in a foundry that mass-produces
high-performance computer chips, proving that their design can be easily and
quickly scaled up for commercial production.
The new chip, described in a paper to be published Dec. 24
in the print issue of the journal Nature, marks the next step in the evolution
of fiber optic communication technology by integrating into a microprocessor
the photonic interconnects, or inputs and outputs (I/O), needed to talk to
other chips.
“This is a milestone. It’s the first processor that can use
light to communicate with the external world,” said Vladimir Stojanović, an
associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the
University of California, Berkeley, who led the development of the chip. “No
other processor has the photonic I/O in the chip.”
The
electronic-photonic processor chip naturally illuminated by red and green bands
of light.
(Image by Glenn J.
Asakawa, University of Colorado, Glenn.Asakawa@colorado.edu)
Stojanović and fellow UC Berkeley professor Krste Asanović
teamed up with Rajeev Ram at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Miloš Popović at the University of Colorado Boulder to develop the new
microprocessor.
“This is the first time we’ve put a system together at such
scale, and have it actually do something useful, like run a program,” said
Asanović, who helped develop the free and open architecture called RISC-V
(reduced instruction set computer), used by the processor.
The illumination
and camera create a rainbow-colored pattern across
the
electronic-photonic processor chip.
(Image by Milos
Popović, University of Colorado, milos.popovic@colorado.edu)
Greater bandwidth
with less power
Compared with electrical wires, fiber optics support greater
bandwidth, carrying more data at higher speeds over greater distances with less
energy. While advances in optical communication technology have dramatically
improved data transfers between computers, bringing photonics into the computer
chips themselves had been difficult.