[NatureL]sun201512-单片光通信微处理器.docxVIP

Letterdoi:10.1038/nature16454Single-chip microprocessor that communicates directly using lightChen Sun1,2*, Mark T. Wade3*, Yunsup Lee1*, Jason S. Orcutt2?*, Luca Alloatti2, Michael S. Georgas2, Andrew S. Waterman1, Jeffrey M. Shainline3?, Rimas R. Avizienis1, Sen Lin1, Benjamin R. Moss2, Rajesh Kumar3, Fabio Pavanello3, Amir H. Atabaki2, Henry M. Cook1, Albert J. Ou1, Jonathan C. Leu2, Yu-Hsin Chen2, Krste Asanovi?1, Rajeev J. Ram2, Milo? A. Popovi?3 Vladimir M. Stojanovi?1Data transport across short electrical wires is limited by both bandwidth and power density, which creates a performance bottleneck for semiconductor microchips in modern computer systems—from mobile phones to large- scale data centres. These limitations can be overcome1–3 by using optical communications based on chip-scale electronic–photonic systems 4–7 enabled by silicon- based nanophotonic devices8 . However, combining electronics and photonics on the same chip has proved challenging, owing to microchip manufacturing conflicts between electronics and photonics. Consequently, current electronic–photonic chips9–11 are limited to niche manufacturing processes and include only a few optical devices alongside simple circuits. Here we report an electronic–photonic system on a single chip integrating over 70 million transistors and 850 photonic components that work together to provide logic, memory, and interconnect functions. This system is a realization of a microprocessor that uses on-chip photonic devices to directly communicate with other chips using light. To integrate electronics and photonics at the scale of a microprocessor chip, we adopt a ‘zero-change’ approach to the integration of photonics. Instead of developing a custom process to enable the fabrication of photonics12, which would complicate or eliminate the possibility of integration with state-of- the-art transistors at large scale and at high yield, we design optical devices using a standard microelectronics foundry process that i