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Computer technology

Silicon chips lighten up

Nature volume 528, pages 483–484 (2015)Cite this article

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Microprocessor communications have received a boost from the integration of electronics and photonics in silicon — a first step towards low power consumption and efficient computing systems. See Letter p.534

Ever since the demonstration of the first microprocessor, 'smaller, cheaper, faster' has been the motto of the microelectronics evolution that enables ever-more-densely packed circuits to speed up computer performance. But a bottleneck now exists in terms of speed and power consumption for on-chip data communications; for instance, conventional wires lose energy and reduce the communication speed. A full transition to optical-link technology using photons would overcome these limitations, because photonic devices have no speed constraints and use less energy than conventional electronics1. Because silicon is the main material for complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, which is widely used by the electronics industry, it has been the subject of intense research in photonics, giving rise to what has been called the silicon photonics age2. Using the same material for electronics and photonics in a single circuit could increase performance and reduce the power consumption of integrated chips. On page 534 of this issue, Sun and co-workers3 report a big advance in such efforts: a microprocessor that communicates using light.

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Figure 1: Processor–memory communication using optical links between two chips.

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References

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  1. Laurent Vivien is at the Institut d'Electronique Fondamentale, CNRS, Université Paris-Sud, Université Paris Saclay, 91405 Orsay, France.,

    Laurent Vivien

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Correspondence to Laurent Vivien.

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Vivien, L. Silicon chips lighten up. Nature 528, 483–484 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/528483a

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