Sun turns to lasers to speed up computer chips

For decades, the semiconductor industry has broken silicon wafers into smaller chips to improve manufacturing yields.

Sun Microsystems has found a way to reconnect the chips so they can communicate with each other at such high speeds that computer designers can build a new generation of computers that are faster, more energy-efficient and more compact.

The company is announcing today a $44 million contract from the Pentagon to explore replacing the wires between computer chips with laser beams.

The technology, part of a field of computer science known as silicon photonics, would eradicate the most daunting bottleneck facing today's supercomputer designers: moving information rapidly to solve problems that require hundreds or thousands of processors.

Computer scientists have long sought a way to make faster and cheaper computers by making larger chips on a single wafer of silicon. If Sun's idea can be proved technically feasible and manufactured commercially, it would be possible to create more-compact machines that are a thousand times faster than today's computers, the company said.

Each chip would be able to communicate directly with every other chip via a beam of laser that could carry billions of bits of data a second.

The Sun researchers acknowledge that their project is a significant gamble.

"This is a high-risk program," said Ron Ho, a researcher at Sun Laboratories who is one of the leaders of the effort. "We expect a 50 percent chance of failure, but if we win we can have as much as a thousand times increase in performance."

Sun's partners on the project are Stanford and the University of California, San Diego; and two silicon photonics firms, Luxtera and Kotura.