Tuesday
Mar082016
Silicon photonics adds off-chip comms to a RISC-V processor
Tuesday, March 8, 2016 at 9:01AM
A group of researchers have developed a microprocessor that uses silicon photonics-based optics to send and receive data.
"For the first time a system - a microprocessor - has been able to communicate with the external world using something other than electronics," says Vladimir Stojanovic, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
The microprocessor is the result of work that started at MIT nearly a decade ago as part of a project sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to investigate the integration of photonics and electronics for off-chip and even intra-chip communications.