San Francisco, Sept 24: US high-tech giant Sun Microsystems has unveiled what it heralded as revolutionary new technology that could make computers much faster and significantly smaller. The company has discovered a way to connect a computer's chips face-to-face rather than linking them through the web of fine wiring laid down on a circuit board, a Sun official said yesterday.
By eliminating the wiring, the discovery could speed up data movement by as much as 100 times while reducing power usage, the official said.
It could also eventually bring an end to the use of printed circuit boards, the wire-laden nerve network which takes up much of the room in electronic products. Sun, a leading computer networking specialist based in Santa Clara, California, revealed its discovery in a paper presented to a conference on integrated circuits in San Jose yesterday.
The new technology's potential impact on computing is immense, said John Gustafson, a senior official of sun's high productivity computing systems division. While the speed of microprocessor chips, the "brains" of computers, has steadily increased every year, overall computer speed has remained constrained by the circuit board wiring under the chips.
Data communications between the chips is ten times slower than that on the chips themselves, experts say. Bureau Report