IBM Creates Commercially Viable, Electronic-Photonic Integrated Chip

An anonymous reader writes "After more than a decade of research, and a proof of concept in 2010, IBM Research has finally cracked silicon nanophotonics (or CMOS-integrated nanophotonics, CINP, to give its full name). IBM has become the first company to integrate electrical and optical components on the same chip, using a standard 90nm semiconductor process. These integrated, monolithic chips will allow for cheap chip-to-chip and computer-to-computer interconnects that are thousands of times faster than current state-of-the-art copper and optical networks. Where current interconnects are generally measured in gigabits per second, IBM's new chip is already capable of shuttling data around at terabits per second, and should scale to peta- and exabit speeds."

Comments

More info

[Geoffrey.landis]

The article is remarkably lacking in technical details.

This article from two years ago is a little more detailed: http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4211151/IBM-debuts-CMOS-silicon-nanophotonics
or this press release: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/33115.wss

Original press release [Re:More info]

[Geoffrey.landis]

And here's the IBM press release
http://researcher.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php?id=2757
which has a sidebar that has "links to additional information" with a lot more details.