Microchips’ optical future: light may replace power to move data

As the United States seeks to reinvigorate its job market and move past economic recession , MIT News examines manufacturing's role in the country's economic future through this series on work at the institute around manufacturing.

Computer chips are one area where the United States still enjoys a significant manufacturing lead over the rest of the world. In 2011, five of the top 10 chipmakers by revenue were US companies, and Intel, the largest of them by a wide margin, has seven manufacturing facilities in the United States, versus only three overseas.

The most recent of those to open, however, is in China, and while that may have been a strategic rather than economic decision - an attempt to gain leverage in the Chinese computer market - both the Chinese and Indian governments have invested heavily in their countries' chip-making capacities.

In order to maintain its manufacturing edge, the United States will need to continue developing new technologies at a torrid pace. And one of those new technologies will almost certainly be an integrated optoelectronic chip - a chip that uses light rather than electricity to move data.

As chips' computational power increases, they need higher-bandwidth connections - whether between servers in a server farm, between a chip and main memory, or between the individual cores on a single chip.

But with electrical connections, increasing bandwidth means increasing power. A 2006 study by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry predicted that by 2025, information technology in Japan alone would consume nearly 250 billion kilowatt-hours' worth of electricity per year, or roughly what the entire country of Australia consumes today.