IBM has introduced a new technique to integrate electrical and optical components on a chip. The CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics said technology should enable a very fast communication between chips and pave the way for a supercomputer with a processing capacity of 1 Exaflop. IBM's CMOS Silicon Integrated Nanophotonics will in particular allow faster communication between chips, because you can combine electrical and optical components on a chip.

The production of such chips is in the conventional CMOS process are possible, which helps to keep production costs low. But IBM still has to prove that the chips can be manufactured in commercial chip factories. Silicon transistors and nano-photonic components share a common silicon layer thereby. This IBM researchers have developed integrated and extremely compact active and passive nanophotonic components allow to have been reduced to the diffraction limit, the smallest size, the dielectric lenses.

Thanks to new technology, it is possible, according to IBM to integrate with a few additional components modulators, germanium and extremely small wavelength multiplexer to analog and digital CMOS circuits. Ultimately, can thus be produced from one optical transceiver chip. So far, they have to be composed of several components. A single-channel transceiver is again an area of 0.5 square millimeters, according to IBM and is now require to ten times smaller than similar devices currently announced. A complete single-chip transceiver, the data throughput several Tbit / s has to be located in a 4 x 4 mm chip to realize large