A Look at Photonic Clocking

zymano writes "In an article on the Electronic Engineering Times site James Siepmann shares a few thoughts about Photonic Clocking. Siepmann states: 'Copper interconnects are reaching their limit as data-transmission bandwidth and processor speed continue to rise. [..] Photonic clocking not only solves the limitations of electronic clocking, but also reduces jitter, skew, delay, crosstalk and power consumption while maintaining clock signal integrity for longer distances.'" Are Photonic Processors the next logical step, or will the almighty buck shuffle them aside because of cost?

Comments

Potentially a good idea, but only that.

[Doug Coulter]

Nice thing about a pulse of light is that it can be made to reach lots of places at the same time, or nearly so. Just a normal burst of light from a point source has a spherical wavefront, but this can be modified by optics in various ways. Having designed plenty of really fast stuff and having had to deal with skew problems, I can see the advantadge, if real use can be made of it. I think it might even be possible on silicon, which would be required for quick adoption -- after all, the LSI only has to receive, the clock light source can be made of anything. Making a hybrid of course drives costs way up, though. but at current profit margins for fast cpu's this may not be much of a real issue.