A PERSONAL SUPER COMPUTER “MACRO-CHIP” WITH PHOTONIC INTERCONNECTS:

This will soon become possible by the cheap nano-imprinting of hundreds of smaller microchips, without the need for laser lithography, onto a single monolithic wafer, with these chips’ communicating with each other at light speed as a single system via silicon photonics. A team at Peking University has set this race in motion in a major way by developing an optical system to boost AI speeds 100-fold by optical interconnects between individual microchips. The next step will be placing all of those chips onto a single monolithic wafer with a similar communication system between them. Nano-imprinting at large node-scale of 15 or 20 nm will make it possible to mass produce wafer scale systems that combine all the best types of computing features, from logic gates to optical AI accelerators in one compact package on a single wafer. Consumers will not care if the computer chips in their computers are not 14-mm wide 2-nm node chips printed by expensive extreme ultraviolet lithography, but are, instead, 8-inch or 12-inch wide super computer “macro-chips” that give 1,000 times the computing power and speed of the best Nvidia computer on the market today, whereon the distance of the individual chiplets on the wafer from the central optical multiplexer becomes part of the ingrained clock feature of the chip, replacing the traditional clock-time limit. The mother boards, GPUs and CPUs of these systems will all exist on the same wafer and communicate at light speed, with the equivalent of something like 1,000 VRAM of unified memory.

These developments come as the shrinking of traditional silicon microchips is facing a final limit. In the same way that the Personal Computer became the game-changer in the 1980’s, it appears that Personal Super-Computers will become the new kid on the block in the 2030’s.

Peking University researchers develop new all-optical interconnect system linking standard electronic chips with specific algorithms.