The IBM researchers published in the Thursday edition of the journal Optics Express a significant milestone in the quest to send information between multiple cores on a chip using pulses of light through silicon, instead of electrical signals on wires.

The breakthrough - known in the industry as a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator - performs the function of converting electrical signals into pulses of light

The company said that its research team had been able to produce electro-optic modulators 100 to 1,000 times smaller than comparable silicon photonics modulators.

The modulator is not something new, as it is currently used in telecommunication companies’ optical networks. However, IBM seems to have been able to shrink this device to a size where it can fit within a multi-core CPU. And this is quite new and represents a great achievement both for the company and for the entire tech world! The optical connections would enable today's dual-core and quad-core chips to grow exponentially into hundreds or thousands of cores in a single chip.

Today, one of the most advanced chips in the world - IBM's Cell processor which powers the Sony Playstation 3 - contains nine cores on a single chip. The new technology aims to enable a power-efficient method to connect hundreds or thousands of cores together on a tiny chip by eliminating the wires required to connect them. Using light instead of wires to send information between the cores can be 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires.

According to Will Green, one of IBM’s research scientists, the new technology is called silicon nanophotonics and it replaces some of the wires of a chip with pulses of light on very small optical fibers for quicker and more power-efficient data between cores on a chip. Thus, silicon nanophotonics is almost 100 times faster than common wires and it consumes one-tenth as much power.

"The silicon nanophotonic effort is a high-bandwidth, low-power technology for cores to communicate," Will Green said and then forecast that “We’ll be able to have hundreds of thousands of cores on a chip.”

Although IBM’s achievement represents a major step, bringing massive computing power to desktops is still at least 10 years away and “there’s still a lot of work to do”, as Green admitted.

But why a normal computer user should care about this breakthrough? Let’s put it this way. Thanks to this technology which is about 100 times faster than wires and consumes one-tenth as much power, supercomputers may soon be the same size as a laptop instead of the size of a basketball court.

IBM is not the only company who is working on finding solutions to use light pulses to transmit data between cores.

Intel and the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) announced the demonstration of the world's first electrically driven Hybrid Silicon Laser. This device successfully integrates the light-emitting capabilities of Indium Phosphide with the light-routing and low cost advantages of silicon. The researchers believe that with this development, silicon photonic chips containing dozens or even hundreds of hybrid silicon lasers could someday be built using standard high-volume, low-cost silicon manufacturing techniques.