Sun devises speed increase in existing chips.

Sun has found that cutting out the middleman can be a good thing.

By placing the chips edge to edge, directly touching, so data can flow freely, Sun has taken out the need for the tiny wires, pads and solder points that now connect chips on printed circuit boards that help make up computer systems, Sun said.

The breakthrough could mean sending data among chips up to 100 times faster than current top transmission rates on traditional semiconductor-chip interconnects, Sun said.

This finding also makes the electronics cheaper and use less power. One of the difficulties will be finding ways to connect the chips together so that they can create desired functionality. From my limited viewpoint, it would seem that many chip configurations would be needed in order to connect chips in the fashion they describe.

In the researchers’ paper, they write that “on-chip” performance has been increasing far more rapidly than “off-chip” communication because the number of transistors on each chip and their speed have outstripped how quickly data can be moved among chips.

“This is a chip-to-chip technology,” Gustafson said. “It could be memory, it could be processing. This is a way of building communication between them.”

Sutherland and the researchers wrote that the difference between on-chip performance and off-chip communication is because the tiny wires that connect to chips and tie them together are “about two orders of magnitude larger” than the wiring that’s on the chip itself.

By connecting chips using Sun’s design–such as lining them up as if on a checkerboard–vastly more powerful, cheaper computer systems could be designed that consume less power, Sun said.

Once again, this is very new technology. We will have to give it time to mature and see what comes of it.

Source: ZDNet