Intel has announced the laboratory development of inexpensive silicon photonics which they’ve put to use in setting a world record for interconnect bandwidth.
Photonics, something of a holy grail for computing, harnesses the power of photons — light — to communicate data within an electronic system. While current processes have obliged the thirst for speed, optical components would offer bandwidth that today’s devices would need hundreds of gigahertz to achieve.
Though optical interconnects have been in testing as far back as the early 2000s, Intel’s announcement in Photonics Nature is significant because their process uses cheap and available silicon to achieve the goal.
The team behind the effort used ordinary silicon to produce an Avalanche Photodiode, or a detector capable of counting photons — binary data — with extremely low noise or interference. The implementation of the silicon APD produced bandwidth equivalent to a device running at a massive 340GHz with today’s design techniques.
In the Nature article, Intel claims that this level of performance is “the best result ever measured for this key APD performance metric” and will serve to meet or exceed 40Gbps in bandwidth.
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