The information processing of the chip needs to do a good job of time regulation, and the speed and accuracy of regulation directly determine the performance of the chip. Beijing University's Chang Lin research team, in collaboration with the Academy of Aerospace Information Innovation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has successfully developed the world's first photonic clock chip, which can increase the time control speed on the chip by 100 times, thus greatly improving the performance of a series of practical applications such as future intelligent computing, 6G communication, and space remote sensing. The results were published in the journal Nature Electronics.
"For traditional chips to produce high-speed information processing capabilities, they usually need electron-based oscillators to generate clock signals. However, at present, the speed of this scheme is not ideal, and it will consume a lot of power and generate high heat. At the same time, a chip often can only produce a clock in a certain frequency range, resulting in different applications, such as 6G, in-vehicle millimeter wave radar, GPU, etc., requiring completely different chip manufacturing technology, which greatly increases the chip cost."
Chang Lin said, "Different from traditional solutions, the photonic chip technology we developed 'uses light as a medium' and generates clock signals through photons. We all know that light is much faster than electricity in terms of speed, so using a photonic clock to process information is much faster than an electronic clock." Chang Lin introduced that the key to the success of the chip is the "transformation" of the "optical frequency comb" technology. In the past, this technology could only be achieved by relying on expensive equipment, which cost millions of yuan and could only be imported. "We have successfully realized the chip of the 'optical frequency comb' technology, by building a racetrack shaped ring on the chip, so that the light is constantly 'running' at the speed of light, and the time of each run can be used as the standard of the on-chip clock." Since this time is very short, usually a few billionth of a second, the photon clock can control time at very high speeds.""With this solution, we can transmit and process information on the chip based on light, which greatly improves the performance of traditional chips." Chang's team found in their experiments that they could cover all current microwave frequency clocks with just one chip. "This also means that the chip can support mobile phone communication from 5G to 6G, and even higher speeds, so that in the past, every upgrade of the communication plan, the need to update the hardware of the phone."
Chang Lin also revealed: "Another important application of this technology is to increase the frequency of computing. At present, whether it is GPU or CPU, the main frequency is generally 2-3ghz, and the clock frequency achieved by our team has exceeded 100GHz. This is equivalent to more calculations in less time, which provides more computing power for AI development." (Reprinted from: Global Semiconductor Watch)