Sapphire chip linked by light

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10 April 2002 News

One of the challenges of making computer chips is to efficiently ferry information into and out of them. While usually done via metal wire conductors, engineers at Johns Hopkins University have now devised a cost-effective way to speed up the way microchips 'talk' to each other by using light! Their method takes advantage of unusual characteristics associated with 'silicon on sapphire' technology. Integrated circuits are usually made up of thin slices of the semiconductor silicon. To this are added layers of synthetic sapphire, an insulator that does not conduct electricity, but allows light to pass through. Signals that originate from a wire are transformed into light and beamed through the transparent sapphire substrate by a tiny laser. Here, microlenses and other optical components collect the light beam and guide it to another place on the chip or, by optical fibre, move it to another chip. At its destination, the light enters a high-speed optical receiver circuit that turns the photons back into a stream of electrons that can be handled by the chip's electrical wiring. According to the researchers a signal could move 100 times faster like this, than with a metal wire. They claim their prototype is capable of shunting information on and off the chip at the rate of one gigabit per second! Since the sapphire substrate is an insulating material, the optoelectric interface circuits require much less power. Wires also have parasitic capacitances, which not only degrade signals but also increase power consumption. Without parasitic capacitance it is much faster to send signals at the speed of light. With processes as small as 0,1 µm the design has the potential to run at 5 Gbps, say the researchers.

So, while hardware gets faster, cheaper and smaller, software still gets slower, costlier and bigger! To read more on this research see www.nd.edu/~stjoseph/newscas/CASMagvol1no3.pdf

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Sapphire chip linked by light

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