ARLINGTON, Va., 25 March 2008. U.S. military researchers are working with Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara, Calif., to find a way for microchips to interconnect by optical network. Chips typically communicate by electrical data paths.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, Va., is awarding Sun Microsystems $44.29 million contract that focuses on microchip interconnectivity via on-chip optical networks enabled by silicon photonics and proximity communication.
The DARPA project, called Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communication (UNIC), builds on DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program, seeks to develop supercomputers through interconnecting an array of low-cost chips, with the potential to overcome the fundamental cost and performance limits of scaling up today's large computer systems.
"DARPA's UNIC program will demonstrate high-performance photonic technology for high-bandwidth, on-chip, photonic communications networks for advanced microprocessors," says Dr. Jag Shah, program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office.
"By restoring the balance between computation and communications, the program will significantly enhance [U.S. Department of Defense] capabilities for applications such as image processing, autonomous operations, synthetic aperture radar, as well as supercomputing," Shah says.
Sun's program combines optical signaling with the company's Proximity Communication chip-to-chip I/O technology, to build arrays of inexpensive chips in one virtual "macrochip."
Such an aggregation of inexpensive chips looks and performs like a single chip of enormous size, thus extending Moore's Law; it also avoids soldered chip connections to lower system cost.
"Optical communications could be a truly game-changing technology, an elegant way to continue impressive performance gains while completely changing the economics of large-scale silicon production," says Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer and executive vice president of research and development for Sun Microsystems.
This story appeared 24 March in Laser Focus World. Click here to read the original story.
