Using electrical signals alone to transfer data has become too slow for the high-speed transfers becoming routine in datacenters and supercomputers. In datacenters, 10Gbit/s is now common in high-end servers and routers. Although fiber optics has replaced copper wires for communications connections outside the system, the time has come to move those speed advantages inside to board and chip data interconnects.
The search for materials that can meet the myriad challenges of board-to-board and chip-to-chip optical interconnects has been ongoing for several years. A new optical silicone-based material developed by Dow Corning and IBM promises to overcome most of those challenges to enable flexible, stable, and easily processable board-level polymer waveguides. The two companies debuted the material earlier this month in a presentation at the Photonics West 2013 conference in San Francisco.
A new silicone-based material developed by Dow Corning and IBM promises to enable flexible, stable, and easily processable board-level optical waveguides, like the prototype shown here, for high-speed data transfer. (Source: IBM Research)
"As you continue to scale silicon by adding more transistors per given area, clock rates aren't going up accordingly," Simon Jones, business builder for Dow Corning Electronics, told Design News. "As we try to increase the rate of data moving down copper wires, the power needed and the cost go up exponentially. Chip-to-chip and chip-to-board interconnects are becoming the rate-limiting issue."
The point at which optical fiber becomes more efficient than copper is occurring in shorter and shorter links. Although there's been limited adoption of optical fiber-based connections at the board level, optical fiber is not scalable like transistors. So the volume of fiber that would be needed for increasing links between chips is too high, Jones told us. Optical links must be integrated into the board in the form of a waveguide.
So far, waveguide materials investigated have included glass, silicon, and various types of polymers. Materials must have the right performance characteristics, including mechanical and optical properties such as low loss and mechanical flexibility, while also being durable and stable enough to withstand high operating heat and humidity. To keep it cost-effective, the material must also be compatible with standard PC board processing equipment, and have a short processing time. Dow Corning has been conducting research into polymer waveguide silicones for the last 10 years.
"The advantage of polymer is its processability, and the fact that you can use it in existing factories," said Jones. "We're doing our best to make this silicone material a drop-in replacement, to enable its adoption in a scalable industrial process." Silicones can be processed faster than glass, and don't need a controlled atmosphere chamber. Other silicones developed for optical waveguides have longer curing times, or are difficult to process. The Dow/IBM material has been successfully processed using both deposition and photopatterning methods, and waveguides have been built in under 45 minutes.
Games may be a large market for high-performance computing, and thus of this technology. But I think what keeps getting lost in this discussion is that high-performance computing will not remain the only stratum where this technology is needed/useful. That's why I said "Remember Ethernet?" to remind us of how those speeds have continued to increase while the need for them has migrated down the performance spectrum. Faster data transfer is and will be needed everywhere, including personal computing devices.
OK, Ann. It still seems that the largest market for high performance computing is in the games area. Of course I realize that the level of power for games is less than that of the high level scientific computers, but thye sales ratio is quite large.
But your comment about servers does indeed point to an area that I had not considered. So now for a question about the "wide" optical interconnect: would it be point to point, or would it be more like a bus? Point to point between adjacent boards could still be done by some other means, while a bus with multiple sources and multiple listners would be an entirely different realm. Very demanding of precise construction and alignment, and probably susceptible to the same problems that lead to hard drives now using the sata interconnect format.
How right you are about the uses of the term "application." And slang, too, although it's fun, often is confusing. However, I was not using "application" to mean a program, or class of programs, but a class of uses--for instance if I write "aerospace applications," this does not mean aerospace software, but various uses in the aerospace industry.
Ann, sorry if I caused confusion by using the word "application". My usage relates to what the word was taken to mean in the past, instead of a corrupted abbreviation for the phrase "application program." Lazy-mouthed slang terms seldom are able to convey a specific meaning accurately, it seems.
I am aware that language does indeed change with usage, but hearing a slang term used to reference somethoing that many people really don't have any understanding of what they are talking about does become rather boring. At least I find repetition without understanding to be boring.
William, I'm not sure where computer gaming as an app for this technology comes from. The "apps" are more in classes of hardware--supercomputers, routers/switches, PCs--than in uses of the hardware. If you mean the technology may eventually come to gaming platforms, I agree--but then, it will also come to PCs and other consumer computing devices. And of course, price/performance tradeoffs will be one determining factor. But, in comms and connectors, that's not enough: market saturation will rule the day.
Ann, you may be correct about data centerapplications, but i suspect that the market for computer gaming toys is much larger. Of course, it will all get down to the ratio of cost-to benefits, won't it?
William, the article mentions supercomputing and datacenters, not computer gaming, for right-now apps. As a long-time student of comms technologies, I know that what starts at the high end--such as those two apps--ends up in the PC, at least as far as data transfer speeds are concerned. Remember when 100 MBps was fast? In the datacenter?
I am a bit familiar with radio frequency waveguides, but not optical ones, other than fiber optics. So thanks for the links.
But it still seems that there are very few applications that would benefit from the very high speed multiple line connections, since it appears that the concept is for these links to carry at least 8-bits wide, and probably 32 0r 64-bit wide data. For single-line interconnections they would probably not be cost effective.
My guess is that the main application would be in medical image processing, which is a growing but rather narrow field. If there are others it would be interesting to hear about them. But computer gaming does not count as a valid application, at least in my book.
William, sounds like you're unclear on the waveguide concept. I suggest you read up on them, and specifically on this board-level one. Wikipedia has a good article on the general subject. The "suitable problem" already exists and the R&D has been going on for some time to implement these at the board level. There's also a fair amount of detail in the links we gave in this article.
Inspired by the hooks a parasitic worm uses to penetrate its host's intestines, the Karp Lab has invented a flexible adhesive patch covered with microneedles that adheres well to wet, soft tissues, but doesn't cause damage when removed.
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