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Posts tagged with "cmos"

Intel developing optical chip-to-chip interconnects

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Intel Corp. is studying optical interconnects with an eye toward replacing chip-to-chip electrical interconnects in order to overcome looming bandwidth issues as microprocessors with an increasing number of cores usher in the era of tera-scale computing.

Ian Young, an Intel Fellow and director of the No. 1 semiconductor company's advanced circuits and technology integration project, presented a paper at the IEEE's International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) here Wednesday (Feb. 11) describing progress in integrating the waveguides, detectors and modulators needed for integrating photonic interconnects directly onto CMOS chips.

Young described the performance of an eight-channel, 90-nm device that has demonstrated transmission and reception speed of up to 10Gb/s. The company's longer-term goal is to make optical components that can achieve higher bandwidth of between 100GB/s to 1 TB/s, Young said.

Source: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213900581

Silicon Photonics Comes to Market

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Silicon photonics--using silicon chips to send and receive data-carrying light signals--promises to revolutionize telecommunications, but so far, it's been largely confined to the lab. Now Luxtera, a startup based in Carlsbad, CA, that spun out of the California Institute of Technology, has announced the first optical cable based on the same silicon technology used to make microprocessors.

The company says that the cable, called Blazar, can send 40 gigabits of data per second through its fiber but will cost as little as today's 20-gigabit-per-second optical cables. Built using standard complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor, or CMOS, processing, the cable is likely to find its first applications in data centers and computer clusters.

"This is the world's first CMOS photonics product," says Cary Gunn, Luxtera CTO. It's the "culmination of eight years of development: six at Luxtera and, prior to that, two years at Caltech."
Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19261/?a=f

Samsung Developed World's Smallest 8.4 megapixel CMOS Image Sensor

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Samsung Electronics announced today an 8.4 megapixel (Mp) CMOS image sensor (CIS) at Samsung’s fourth annual Mobile Solution Forum.

The new CIS chip provides a high signal to noise ratio (SNR), a key measure of overall image quality. Samsung achieved the high-resolution level by implementing advanced light sensing features and minimized noise levels. Notably, an extended photo diode technology was implemented to achieve higher light sensitivity and saturation levels, resulting in an enhanced fill factor.

Furthermore, it provides the same image quality as the charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensors currently used in most digital cameras and camcorders. Since the new CIS only uses one-tenth the power of a CCD image sensor, it should quickly replace CCDs in all three key applications-mobile phones, digital cameras and camcorders.

http://www.physorg.com/news94226880.html
January 2010
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