Just when it looked like Moore’s law was sputtering and was on the way out, it has come back with a mighty bang, and become very relevant yet again, courtesy, IBM’s brand new ultra tiny Nanophotonic switch. And the Big Blue chose St. Patrick’s day to make this very dramatic announcement. This announcement comes barely months after IBM’s Silicon nanophotonics for the memory banks and its very innovative high speed optical download, the green link. So what the nanophotonic switch actually do to make Moore’s law relevant again? Instead of conventionally using electrons to transfer information inside a computer chip, IBM engineers have now devised a way to use light pulses to carry the information inside the chip. Using a number of wavelengths of different coloured light switching simultaneously makes it possible for the nanophotonic switch to transmit very large amounts of data.
Move over quad core processors, it is now possible to have thousands of cores in a single processor with the nanophotonic switch. All this is done by using the nanophotonic switch like ultra miniaturised optical fibres which carry information inside the processor. This makes the processor carry 100 times more data and use 10 times lesser energy.
Source: Engadget
