New Sun technology could mean end to integrated circuit board

IDG News Service - Researchers at Sun Microsystems Inc. have created a new way for computer components to communicate with each other that could ultimately spell the end of the integrated circuit board.
The new technology, called proximity communication, will be presented by Sun Labs researcher Robert Drost in a paper delivered at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.'s Custom Integrated Circuits Conference today in San Jose.
Proximity communication is based on the same electrical principles that govern devices used to store electrical charges, called capacitors. A capacitor is made up of two oppositely charged pieces of metal that are separated by an insulator material like polystyrene. They have been used in a variety of devices, from radio tuners to power supplies to the Leyden jar that Benjamin Franklin used in his famous kite experiment.
The research being unveiled today will show how a dozen Sun engineers, led by Sun fellow Ivan Sutherland, have managed to harness the principles behind the capacitor to transfer data between chips without using the pins and wires that physically connect components in today's computers, said John Gustafson, a principal investigator at Sun Labs. "You bring the chips close enough together, and they can talk without touching," he said.
Using a technique called capacitive coupling, Sun engineers have been able to transfer data between components at 21.6Gbit/sec. -- about half the speed of the 800-MHz front-side bus on Intel Corp.'s latest Pentium 4 microprocessor, "without even trying," Gustafson said. The rate at which data can be transferred between components like the computer's memory and processor has increasingly become a bottleneck for the computer industry, since the silicon and wires connecting computer components have simply not been able to transfer data as quickly as new components can process it.
"It's a choke point," said Gustafson. "For the longest time there was no hope in the industry of getting past that choke point."
But proximity communication could represent a work-around to this problem. Gustafson predicted that within a few years, the Sun Labs team could achieve much faster transfer rates using this technique. "We could do up to a trillion bits per second, in and out of a chip, which starts to match the speed of the computer," he said.
The funding for Sun's research into proximity communication came in part from a $50 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant that Sun received in July to build a prototype high-end computer system. In 2006, Sun will compete with two other companies, Cray Inc. and IBM, for funding

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