Light breaks chip performance barrier
With excessive amounts of homework, tests, and the hundreds of extra-curricular activities offered here at Mines, many students are unaware of the exciting research happening right in their own backyard.
In the physics department, master’s graduate Jon Banks talks about the research he is involved in. Working in a research group, Banks focuses on Integrated Optics, which essentially means he is figuring out how to put fiber optics on a processor chip, virtually eliminating the communication time between cores on a multi-core processor. With the speeds of current processors, the last real bottleneck within the chip itself is how the individual cores send information between themselves. What this particular group of researchers is trying to do is to eliminate that bottleneck by placing circuits that use light on the chip itself. This would pave the way for vast increases in processing power, potentially making it feasible to use 20 cores on a single chip.