Engineers Demo First Processor That Uses Light for Ultrafast Communications
December 31st, 2015Via: UC Berkeley:
“This is a milestone. It’s the first processor that can use light to communicate with the external world,” said Vladimir Stojanovi?, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the development of the chip. “No other processor has the photonic I/O in the chip.”
Stojanovi? and fellow UC Berkeley professor Krste Asanovi? teamed up with Rajeev Ram at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Miloš Popovi? at the University of Colorado Boulder to develop the new microprocessor.
“This is the first time we’ve put a system together at such scale, and have it actually do something useful, like run a program,” said Asanovi?, who helped develop the free and open architecture called RISC-V (reduced instruction set computer), used by the processor.
