OREANDA-NEWS. August 31, 2012.  Fujitsu Laboratories Limited today announced the development of an integrated silicon optical transmitter for use in an optical transceiver(1), which is essential for enabling large volumes of data to be transmitted between CPUs.

Thermal fluctuations from the heat emitted by CPUs have a large impact on both the light source built into optical transmitters located near CPUs and the optical modulators(2) that encode data into the light emitted from the light source. This means a thermal control mechanism has been required to ensure that the operating wavelengths of both the light source and optical modulator consistently match. Fujitsu Laboratories previously devised a structure incorporating both the light source and optical modulator that did not require thermal control and demonstrated identical thermal properties by using separate prototypes of the light source and the optical modulator. This time, using the same structure to make a prototype optical transmitter that integrates the light source and optical modulator on the same silicon chip, Fujitsu Laboratories demonstrated that it could achieve optical modulation signals at speeds of 10 Gbps at temperatures ranging from 25єC to 60єC without a thermal control mechanism. Moreover, the overall electricity consumed by the optical transmitter was reduced by roughly half compared to previous methods.

This technology enables compact, low-power optical transceivers to be mounted directly in CPU packaging. Through its application exaflops-class supercomputers(3) and high-end servers requiring high-speed transmission of large volumes of data, the technology paves the way for super-high-speed computers.

Details of this technology will be presented at the 9th Group IV Photonics international conference (GFP 2012), running August 29-31 in San Diego.