Single-chip microprocessor that communicates directly using light

By Chen Sun, M. Wade, Yunsup Lee, J. Orcutt, L. Alloatti, M. Georgas, Andrew Waterman, J. Shainline, Rimas Avizienis, Sen Lin and 12 more. Nature, 2015

1,218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Data transport across short electrical wires is limited by both bandwidth and power density, which creates a performance bottleneck for semiconductor microchips in modern computer systems—from mobile phones to large-scale data centres. These limitations can be overcome by using optical communications based on chip-scale electronic–photonic systems enabled by silicon-based nanophotonic devices8. However, combining electronics and photonics on the same chip has proved challenging, owing to microchip manufacturing conflicts between electronics and photonics. Consequently, current electronic–photonic chips are limited to niche manufacturing processes and include only a few optical devices alongside simple circuits. Here we report an electronic–photonic system on a single chip integrating over 70 million transistors and 850 photonic components that work together to provide logic, memory, and interconnect functions. This system is a realization of a microprocessor that uses on-chip photonic devices to directly communicate with other chips using light. To integrate electronics and photonics at the scale of a microprocessor chip, we adopt a ‘zero-change’ approach to the integration of photonics. Instead of developing a custom process to enable the fabrication of photonics, which would complicate or eliminate the possibility of integration with state-of-the-art transistors at large scale and at high yield, we design optical devices using a standard microelectronics foundry process that is used for modern microprocessors. This demonstration could represent the beginning of an era of chip-scale electronic–photonic systems with the potential to transform computing system architectures, enabling more powerful computers, from network infrastructure to data centres and supercomputers.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/43034efa432f55931d0ae00fb6a4eda26ac87f1d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

The physics of optical computing (2023, background): “The low-loss transmission of optics is already being taken advantage of in electronic computing: optical links in data centres 82 , and even directly between chips 83 , use light to communicate information over length scales from centimetres to many metres.”
Silicon Quantum Photonics (2015, background): “The promise of an optical interconnect, whereby communications between electronic processor cores and between processor cores and memory [15] are handled optically— increasing range and bandwidth—has strongly motivated the development of silicon photonics so far.”
Photon-trapping microstructures enable high-speed high-efficiency silicon photodiodes (2017, methodology): “Considering the 20 ps FWHM response for the 20 GHz sampling oscilloscope and the optical laser pulse width of <1 ps, the actual response of the device was estimated to be 23 ps at 850 nm, based on equation (1)47:”
Integrating photonics with silicon nanoelectronics for the next generation of systems on a chip (2018, background): “appearing in the process: (1) and (2), transistor and photonic isolation fabrication; (3) transistor 507 front-end fabrication up to source/drain implant, including gate definition; (4) deposition, anneal, 508 and polishing of photonic polysilicon film; (5) polysilicon full and partial etching for f”
Deep learning with coherent nanophotonic circuits (2016, background): “However, recent dramatic improvements in optical interconnects using integrated photonics technology has the potential to significantly reduce data-movement energy cost [46].”
Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits for Wavelength-Division Multiplexing Applications (2016, neutral): “in the future [7], [8].”
Photonic Packaging: Transforming Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuits into Photonic Devices (2016, neutral): “, Si-photonics for high-speed signaling and sensing, and CMOS-electronics for subsequent logical operations and computations [5].”