Intel developing optical chip-to-chip interconnects
Intel Corp. is studying optical interconnects with an eye toward replacing chip-to-chip electrical interconnects in order to overcome looming bandwidth issues as microprocessors with an increasing number of cores usher in the era of tera-scale computing.
Ian Young, an Intel Fellow and director of the No. 1 semiconductor company's advanced circuits and technology integration project, presented a paper at the IEEE's International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) here Wednesday (Feb. 11) describing progress in integrating the waveguides, detectors and modulators needed for integrating photonic interconnects directly onto CMOS chips.
Young described the performance of an eight-channel, 90-nm device that has demonstrated transmission and reception speed of up to 10Gb/s. The company's longer-term goal is to make optical components that can achieve higher bandwidth of between 100GB/s to 1 TB/s, Young said.
