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SUN PRESENTS CHIP-DESIGN BREAKTHROUGH

Network computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. researchers reported that they have devised a way to dramatically increase the speed at which semiconductors can talk to each other.

By placing the chips edge to edge, directly touching, so data can flow freely, Sun has taken out the need for the tiny wires, pads and solder points that now connect chips on printed circuit boards that help make up computer systems, Sun said.

The breakthrough could mean sending data among chips up to 100 times faster than current top transmission rates on traditional semiconductor-chip interconnects, Sun said.

It would also solve one of the oldest challenges in the chip industry: the bottlenecks that crop up when chips -- which are getting ever faster -- are connected to one another.

"It's faster, cheaper, and uses less power," said John Gustafson, principal investigator for Sun's high productivity computing systems.

Hit hard by downturn, Sun already holds seven patents on the new design and will seek to capitalize on them commercially, a Sun spokesman said.

Even though Sun has been harder hit than rivals International Business Machines Corp., Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. in the technology downturn, it continues to invest aggressively in research and development.

Sun researchers Ivan Sutherland, a Sun vice president and research fellow, Robert Drost and Robert Hopkins, presented their findings in a paper entitled "Proximity Communication" at the Custom Integrated Circuits Conference on Tuesday in San Jose, California.

Gustafson said that, as far as he knew, most of semiconductor industry has hit a wall in terms of pushing the current, standard, solder and wire interconnects, as far as they could.

DESIGNED FOR POWER

In the researchers' paper, they write that "on-chip" performance has been increasing far more rapidly than "off-chip" communication because the number of transistors on each chip and their speed have outstripped how quickly data can be moved among chips.

"This is a chip-to-chip technology," Gustafson said. "It could be memory, it could be processing. This is a way of building communication between them."

Sutherland and the researchers wrote that the difference between on-chip performance and off-chip communication is because the tiny wires that connect to chips and tie them together are "about two orders of magnitude larger" than the wiring that's on the chip itself.

By connecting chips using Sun's design -- such as lining them up as if on a checkerboard -- vastly more powerful, cheaper computer systems could be designed that consume less power, Sun said.

"We really have to do all this work now to see what we can do with it down the line," Gustafson said.