Research has been ongoing at Sun Labs to increase the speed of systems that are made of hundreds of chips. The results were presented recently at the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference. Ivan E. Sutherland, a Sun vice president and research fellow, Robert J. Drost and Robert D. Hopkins authored a paper on their results of sending data between chips.

As reported by The New York Times, the research showed that data could be sent at a speed of 21.6 billion bits a second between chips in a scaled-down version of the new technology. The Intel Pentium 4 processor is the fastest desktop chip; it can transmit about 50 billion bits a second. The researchers expect speeds to exceed a trillion bits per second when the technology is used in complete products.

The research grew out of work being done at Sun Labs which is funded by a recently won grant from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (The report on this award was covered in article number [10379].)

The method of increasing the speed of transmitting data inside a computer is to place the edge of one chip directly in contact with another chip. This is in contrast to current circuit board design that has wires soldered together. The wires are smaller on the chips Sun is working on, reducing the amount of power needed. More connection points are added which reduces bottlenecks. More chips could be packed in more densely than is possible today.

"It could represent the end of the printed circuit board," said Jim Mitchell, director of Sun Labs. "It makes things way, way faster."

"It's pretty exciting in what it has enabled," said Marc Tremblay, a Sun microprocessor designer. "As you cross boundaries between chips, that's where the pipe has been narrow." [...read more...]

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