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IBM announces silicon photonics breakthrough, set to break 100Gb/s barrierBy Joel Hruska on May 14, 2015 at 4:49 pm

... '' As part of that effort, IBM’s research teams have worked to reduce the process node that it used for circuit design. This slide from 2012 shows how 90nm – 65nm represents the “sweet spot” for these kinds of circuits. While we’re used to smaller nodes offering substantial benefits to traditional CPU transistors, other kinds of components don’t see the same benefits from scaling to smaller process geometries. IBM’s documentation refers to sub-100nm manufacturing, implying that the company standardized at 90nm or 65nm.

IBM isn’t giving timelines for when we might see more devices shipping with on-chip silicon photonics, but we can predict how the technology will roll out. Current cutting-edge designs put the optical components on the same physical package as the CPU, or at the edge of a motherboard. This makes the hardware useful for server-to-server linkages or possibly for peripheral connection. We expect to see silicon photonics roll out first in the HPC and scientific computing industries, where the sheer scale of many build-outs makes the power conservation critical and government grants are available to ease the cost of initial deployment.

After decades of work, silicon photonics might seem like just another pie-in-the-sky idea that sounds great on paper and never pans out — but from HP to Intel to IBM, progress is happening in this field. Hardware may not roll out today or next year, but optical signaling is going to play a part of computing’s future — in the datacenter, even if nowhere else.