The One-Trillion-Bits-Per-Second Chip is Here

IBM's Holey Optochip IBM

Holey Optochip! The One-Trillion-Bits-Per-Second Chip Is Here -- Popular Science

The high data loads of the future--and even the present--require that optical communications platforms continue to get faster, leaner, and cheaper. At the Optical Fiber Communication Conference in Los Angeles today, IBM will report on a prototype optical chip it has developed that has hit a significant milestone in optical data transfer: one terabit--that’s one trillion bits--per second.

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Next Generation of Computer Chips

Caltech engineers have developed a new way to isolate light on a photonic chip, allowing light to travel in only one direction. This finding can lead to the next generation of computer-chip technology: photonic chips that allow for faster computers and less data loss. (Credit: Caltech/Liang Feng)

Engineers Solve Longstanding Problem in Photonic Chip Technology: Findings Help Pave Way for Next Generation of Computer Chips -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Aug. 5, 2011) — Stretching for thousands of miles beneath oceans, optical fibers now connect every continent except for Antarctica. With less data loss and higher bandwidth, optical-fiber technology allows information to zip around the world, bringing pictures, video, and other data from every corner of the globe to your computer in a split second. But although optical fibers are increasingly replacing copper wires, carrying information via photons instead of electrons, today's computer technology still relies on electronic chips.

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DNA May Help Build Next Generation of Chips

From Gadget Lab:

In the race to keep Moore’s Law alive, researchers are turning to an unlikely ally: DNA molecules that can be positioned on wafers to create smaller, faster and more energy-efficient chips.

Researchers at IBM have made a significant breakthrough in their quest to combine DNA strands with conventional lithographic techniques to create tiny circuit boards. The breakthrough, which allows for the DNA structures to be positioned precisely on substrates, could help shrink computer chips to about a 6-nanometer scale. Intel’s latest chips, by comparison, are on a 32-nanometer scale.

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From Sand To Silicon: the Making Of A Chip

From Intel:

Illustrations - Making of a Chip

View this graphic presentation offering a high-level demonstration of the process for manufacturing a central processing unit (CPU), which operates in every PC today. Here you can catch a glimpse of some of the amazingly sophisticated work going on daily inside Intel's cutting-edge silicon manufacturing fabs.

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MIT Researchers Develop Graphene-based Microchip That Can Operate At 1,000GHz

From Soft Sailer:

Researchers at MIT have developed a graphene-based microchip that can operate at 1,000GHz, a much higher speed that conventional silicon chips would ever dream of reaching. These ultra-fast microchips can improve the data transfer rate for cellphones, computers, or other electronic devices. When it was discovered in 2004, graphene was regarded as a material that could lead to many new applications and it seems like this form of pure carbon can contribute to manufacturing transistors and prototype devices.

The research was led by Tomás Palacios, assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, EECS assistant professor Jing Kong, and two of their students, Han Wang and Daniel Nezich. The MIT team of researchers developed a graphene chip that was supposed to act as a frequency multiplier which can input an electrical signal of a specified frequency and output an electrical signal with a multiplied frequency.

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