Intel tests 40Gbps photonic interconnect
Thrax
🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
For years Intel, and other IC companies, have been rushing to do away with copper as the primary interconnect between lots of silicon on chips. Copper is great, but its limit rapidly approaches, and the freaky science of quantum mechanics is starting to rear its head as these copper-interconnected chips shrink further and further.
Enter the photonic interconnect; a neat little bit of fibre optics and silicon that allows information to be sent as digital pulses of light instead of analogue pulses of electricity. The benefit of this is two-fold: Primarily, information will be churned through a CPU in terabit per second capacities, instead of Gbp/s flavours. Secondly, digital signal modulation is very precise and does not suffer from electron leakage or signal jitter which is sabotaging the advancement of copper/silicon chips.
While each interconnect currently costs thousands to produce, Intel hopes to make this the reasonable successor to today's technology. You can read more: Here.
Enter the photonic interconnect; a neat little bit of fibre optics and silicon that allows information to be sent as digital pulses of light instead of analogue pulses of electricity. The benefit of this is two-fold: Primarily, information will be churned through a CPU in terabit per second capacities, instead of Gbp/s flavours. Secondly, digital signal modulation is very precise and does not suffer from electron leakage or signal jitter which is sabotaging the advancement of copper/silicon chips.
While each interconnect currently costs thousands to produce, Intel hopes to make this the reasonable successor to today's technology. You can read more: Here.
0
Comments