Recently, scientific researchers have successfully developed a brand new data transmission system that pairs high-frequency silicon chips with hair-thin polymer cables to achieve information transmission speed 10 times faster than USB. The system may one day increase the energy efficiency of data centers and reduce the load on electronic components.
Credit: Courtesy of the researchers, edited by MIT News
This study was presented in February this year at the IEEE International Solid State Circuit Conference. The lead author is Jack Holloway ’03, MNG ’04, who completed his PhD in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) of the MIT Institute last fall and currently works at Raytheon. Co-authors include Holloway PhD supervisor and associate professor Ruonan Han at EECS, and Georgios Dogiamis, a senior fellow at Intel.
Holloway said: "The amount of information shared between computer chips is explosively growing - cloud computing, the Internet, big data. Many of this happen through traditional copper wires. But copper wires, such as copper wires in USB or HDMI cables, are very power-consuming - especially when dealing with heavy data loads."
Holloway says that while the demand for rapid data transfer (more than 100 gigabits per second) through catheters longer than one meter, the mainstream solution has been "increasingly bulky and expensive" copper wire. An alternative to
copper wire is optical cable, but this also has its own problems. Copper wire uses electrical signals, while optical fiber uses photon . This allows optical fibers to quickly transmit data and have low energy consumption. But computer chip is usually not very photon-compatible, which makes the interconnection between fiber optic cables and computers a challenge. "There is currently no way to effectively generate, amplify or detect photons in silicon. Although there are various expensive and complex integration solutions, it is not a good solution from an economics point of view."
The team's new link draws on the advantages of copper tubes and fiber optic conduits without their disadvantages. Dogiamis "This is an example of a good complementary solution. Their conduit is made of plastic polymer, so it is lighter than traditional copper cables and may also be less expensive to manufacture. But when the polymer link runs with sub-terahertz electromagnetic signals, it is much more energy efficient than copper cables when transmitting high data loads. The efficiency of the new link is comparable to that of optical fibers, but with a key advantage: "It can be directly compatible with silicon chips without any special manufacturing."
The team sets Such low-cost chips are paired with polymer conduits. Typically, silicon chips are difficult to operate at sub-terahertz frequencies. However, the team's new chips produce those high-frequency signals and have enough power to transfer data directly into the conduit. The researchers say this clean connection from silicon chips to the conduit means that the entire system can be manufactured in a standard, cost-effective way.
and the new cable is also better than copper in size, Han "The cross-sectional area of our cable is 0.4 mm x 0.25 mm, so, it's super tiny, like a strand of hair. Despite its slight size, it can carry a lot of data as it sends signals through three different parallel channels and is separated by the frequency. The total bandwidth of the link is 105 gigabits per second, almost an order of magnitude faster than copper-based USB cables”. Dogiamis says this cable can solve the bandwidth challenge, as we see this big trend towards increasing data.
