By Peter Weiss
By linking loops of silicon on a microcircuit, researchers have taken a major stride toward using light to shuttle information within computer chips. The new approach may lead to circuitry that can manipulate exceptionally large amounts of data and introduce the delays often required for a chip to coordinate calculations and communications.
Computer manufacturers are currently cramming multiple electronic-computing modules, or microprocessors, onto individual chips of semiconducting material. For instance, the powerful electronic brain of the Sony PlayStation 3 video game controller jams nine microprocessors onto a single chip. As the number of modules per chip continues to multiply in the coming decade, the data traffic is expected to outstrip the information-handling capacity of the electronic microcircuits that carry and route the traffic, says Yurii A. Vlasov of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.