IBM announced that a significant step forward in what is called silicon nanophotonics, which the integration of optical communications with common silicon chips. This technology uses light pulses instead of electrical signals for communications and provides a kind of highway to transport large volumes of data between silicon chips.

IBM research in the field of nanophotonics started in the last decade and in 2010 led to the creation of a nanophotonic avalanche photodetector, a key component of what the company calls a nanophotonics kit. In fact, it can receive optical pulses that travel at a speed of more than 25 gigabits per second per channel but it’s composed of the common elements in chip industry, meaning silicon and germanium.

The new step made after more than two years is the fact that IBM has solved the problems that a company faces to turn an experiment performed in a laboratory with equipment specifically built into industrial production. In recent years, we have read many reports of extraordinary creations of components that might be used in the next generation computers mentioning graphene and quantum computing but they’re still experiments so we don’t know if or when there will be a commercial production. In this case, IBM has produced these new chips using an industrial production process.

IBM used a commercial semiconductor manufacturing 90 nanometers process, which is a standard process used for years. An old production line was added just some modules to obtain new optical transceivers on a single chip. In this way, it’s possible to produce nanophotonic components at reduced costs.

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With the ability to use multiple wavelengths on the same optical fiber, it’s possible to transmit parallel data streams obtaining the exchange of optical data volumes which can be of the order of the Terabytes between various parts of a computer system. For server systems, data centers and supercomputers, always hungry for bandwidth, it will certainly be a big step forward.

IBM has always been involved in the creation of systems of great complexity and is developing new technologies to create a supercomputer to be used with the SKA (Square Kilometre Array) radio telescope, which among other things will need to process really huge amounts of data. These new silicon nanophotonic chips could give a big hand in this work.

Sooner or later, these new nanophotonic chips will start being used in normal computers but who knows how long it will take. Of course, once their industrial production actually start it’s only a matter of time before PC using them are created.