Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) has been awarded $44.29 million funding for a five and a half-year research project focused on microchip interconnectivity via on-chip optical networks enabled by Silicon photonics and proximity communication. Part of DARPA's Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communication program, the project commences with an incremental delivery of $8.1 million to Sun Microsystems' Microelectronics and Laboratories divisions.
Building on research done under DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program, Sun's new project will accelerate the development of lower cost, high performance and high productivity systems. The project presents a unique opportunity to develop supercomputers through interconnecting an array of low-cost chips, with the potential to overcome the fundamental cost and performance limits of scaling up today's large computer systems. By providing unprecedented high bandwidth, low latency, and low power interconnections between the parallel computing chips in such an array, this research project will help enable a broad class of companies and organizations to utilize applications with high compute and communication requirements, such as energy exploration, biotechnology and weather modeling.
Sun's program combines optical signaling with Proximity Communication, its key chip-to-chip I/O technology, to construct arrays of low-cost chips in a single virtual "macrochip." Such an aggregation of inexpensive chips looks and performs like a single chip of enormous size, thus extending Moore's Law; it also avoids soldered chip connections to enable lower total system cost. Long connections across the macrochip leverage the low latency, high bandwidth, and low power of silicon optics, and through this program Sun and DARPA will research technologies to dramatically further reduce the cost of these optical connections. The result is a virtual supercomputer.
"DARPA's UNIC (Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communications) program will demonstrate high performance photonic technology for high bandwidth, on-chip, photonic communications networks for advanced (≥ 10 trillion operations/second) microprocessors. By restoring the balance between computation and communications, the program will significantly enhance DoD's capabilities for applications such as Image Processing, Autonomous Operations, Synthetic Aperture Radar, as well as supercomputing," said Dr. Jag Shah, program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office.
Following the success of the evaluation trials conducted at the National University Hospital of Singapore, Veredus Laboratories and STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) announced the commercial availability of VereFlu™, a portable lab-on-chip application for rapid detection of all major influenza types at the point of need. Unlike existing diagnostic methods, VereFlu is a breakthrough molecular diagnostic test that can detect infection with high accuracy and sensitivity, within two hours providing genetic information of the infection that traditionally would take days to weeks to learn. With its high level of automation, users outside the traditional lab environment can easily perform the tests at the point of need.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have set the stage for building the “evolutionary link” between the microelectronics of today built from semiconductor compounds and future generations of devices made largely from complex organic molecules. In an upcoming paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society,* a NIST team demonstrates that a single layer of organic molecules can be assembled on the same sort of substrate used in conventional microchips.