Sun Wins $44.29 Million Department of Defense Research Contract

Sun will be heading a research project on microchip interconnectivity funded by the Department of Defense to the tune of $44.29 million. The 5 1/2 year project will begin with $8.1 million provided to Sun Microsystems\' Microelectronics and Laboratories divisions which will be focusing on microchip interconnectivity via on-chip optical networks enabled by Silicon photonics and proximity communication.

The project will be working to develop supercomputers through interconnecting an array of low-cost chips. Sun's program combines optical signaling with Proximity Communication, its key chip-to-chip I/O technology, to construct arrays of low-cost chips in a single virtual "macrochip." Such an aggregation of inexpensive chips looks and performs like a single chip of enormous size, reports Sun. It also avoids soldered chip connections to enable lower total system cost. Long connections across the macrochip leverage the low latency, high bandwidth and low power of silicon optics.

"Silicon photonics has become hot recently with major semiconductor and computer companies as well as start-ups investing heavily in efforts to build optical networking directly into processors to replace electrical wires," observed John Markoff writing for the New York Times. "If the Sun researchers’ idea can be proved technically feasible and manufactured commercially, it would be possible to create more-compact machines that are a thousand times faster than today’s computers, the company said. Each chip would be able to communicate directly with every other chip in the array via a beam of laser light that could carry tens billions of bits of data a second."

Ron Ho, a researcher at Sun Laboratories who is one of the leaders of the effort, told Markoff that this project is definitely a gamble. “This is a high-risk program," Ho said. "We expect a 50 percent chance of failure, but if we win we can have as much as a thousand times increase in performance.”

Together, Sun and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will be researching technologies to further reduce the cost of these optical connections.

Dr. Jag Shah, program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office, commented, "DARPA's UNIC (Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communications) program will demonstrate high performance photonic technology for high bandwidth, on-chip, photonic communications networks for advanced (≥ 10 trillion operations/second) microprocessors. By restoring the balance between computation and communications, the program will significantly enhance DoD's capabilities for applications such as Image Processing, Autonomous Operations, Synthetic Aperture Radar, as well as supercomputing,"

By providing unprecedented high bandwidth, low latency and low power interconnections between the parallel computing chips in such an array, this research project could help other companies and organizations utilize applications with high compute and communication requirements, such as energy exploration, biotechnology and weather modeling.

"Optical communications could be a truly game-changing technology - an elegant way to continue impressive performance gains while completely changing the economics of large-scale silicon production," said Greg Papadopoulos, CTO and executive vice president of research and development for Sun.

Innovating@Sun Podcast: The Brave New World of Chip-Level Optical Interconnects

To learn more, tune in to the Innovating@Sun podcast The Brave New World of Chip-Level Optical Interconnects where host and Vice President of Global Systems Engineering Hal Stern speaks with Distinguished Engineers from Sun's Microelectronics Group, Ashok Krishnamoorthy and Jack Cunningham, about:

What the UNIC program is
Why optical interconnects at a chip-to-chip level is a big deal
Improving the density of communication by two to three orders of magnitude
Changing the notion of what a wire or interconnect is
Bringing signaling to speed-of-light levels
Transparently communicating from one chip to another via optical proximity communication
Effects on compute density
Timeframe for the research/project
Possible impacts in relation to Moore's Law

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