Tag: computer chips

Sun To Replace Computer Wires With Leaser beams To Connect Processor Chips

Sun is trying to replace the wires between computer chips with laser beams to eliminating a bottleneck. For decades, the semiconductor industry has broken silicon wafers into smaller chips to improve manufacturing yields. From the article:

Sun Microsystems is trying to do for computing what all the king’s horses and men failed to do for Humpty Dumpty. For decades, the semiconductor industry has broken silicon wafers into smaller chips to improve manufacturing yields.

Now Sun 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 computer maker, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., plans to announce on Monday that it has received a $44 million contract from the Pentagon to explore the high-risk idea of replacing the wires between computer chips with laser beams.

I’m not an expert in electricity or electronics but on paper a laser should move as fast as energy. I really hope this will to improve speed :) 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.

Nasa’s Radiation Resistant Computers

Well on the earth we don’t need a radiation resistant computers. But when you go high in the sky you need the some sort of radiation resistant computers. But what is the need of such computers? Well let me take example of virus, who destroys data and/or just crashes computer completely, it can be frustrating for us. Now just imagine same situation for an astronaut trusting a computer to run navigation and life-support systems, such crash could be fatal.

According to NASA, the radiation that pervades space can trigger such glitches.

When high-speed particles, such as cosmic rays, collide with the microscopic circuitry of computer chips, they can cause chips to make errors. If those errors send the spacecraft flying off in the wrong direction or disrupt the life-support system, it could be bad news.

So NASA’s new project called Environmentally Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Computing (EAFTC) tries to address these problems. The idea is very simple advanced computers that can think clearly even when they’re bombarded by space radiation.