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Physicists Develop a Cooling System for the Processors of the Future
April 20, 2016 | ACSEstimated reading time: 3 minutes
Researchers from MIPT have found a solution to the problem of overheating of active plasmonic components. These components will be essential for high-speed data transfer within the optoelectronic microprocessors of the future, which will be able to function tens of thousands of times faster than the microprocessors currently in use today. In the paper published in ACS Photonics the researchers have demonstrated how to efficiently cool optoelectronic chips using industry-standard heatsinks in spite of high heat generation in active plasmonic components.
The speed of multicore and manycore microprocessors, which are already used in high-performance computer systems, depends not so much on the speed of an individual core, but rather on the time it takes for data to be transferred between the cores. The electrical copper interconnects used in microprocessors today are fundamentally limited in bandwidth, and they cannot be used to maintain the continuing growth of the processor performance. In other words, doubling the number of cores will not double the processing power.
Leading companies in the semiconductor industry, such as IBM, Oracle, Intel, and HP, see the only solution to this problem in switching from electronics to photonics, and they are currently investing billions of dollars into this. Replacing electrons with photons will mean that large amounts of data will be able to be transferred between processor cores almost instantly, which in turn will mean that the processor performance will be nearly proportional to the number of cores. However, due to diffraction, photonic components are not as easy to scale down as electronic components. Their dimensions cannot be smaller than the size approximately equal to the light wavelength (~ 1 micrometer or 1000 nanometers), but transistors will soon be as small as 10 nanometers. This fundamental problem can be solved by switching from bulk waves to surface waves, which are known as surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). This will enable to confine light on the nanoscale. Along with the leading research centers of industrial companies and the laboratories of leading universities, Russian scientists from the Laboratory of Nanooptics and Plasmonics of MIPT’s Center of Nanoscale Optoelectronics are also making good progress in this field.
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