High wire acrobats frequently walk the wire without a net, but chips seem set to trump them by communicating without wires. Proximity Communication continues to feature regularly in the news as it matures. The Sun Web feature Contrarian Minds describes Jack Cunningham's work this month. Cunningham leads the team working on an advanced packaging solution for the technology, focusing on placement accuracy and power supplies.

Alignment of chips is vital to Proximity Communication - if the transmitters on one chip do not align perfectly with the receivers on the other, the coupling might not be strong enough for communication to take place. Jack and Ashok Krishnamoorthy have come up with a technique involving pits on one chip and what they call microspheres on the other. Bring them to within 200 microns of each other, let the chip with the pits go, and voilà, it rolls into perfect alignment with the other chip. A pit and ball approach, if you will.

The article also describes Cunningham's work in the design of how the chips receive all the power they require.

Some of Krishnamoorthy's other research is described in a June 2008 Contrarian Minds article - using light to communicate between chips turns out to be a pretty smart idea. Such research resulted in a DARPA contract for the Ultraperformance Nanophotonic Intrachip Communication project, and The Register reported recently on the work that Sun will be doing along with Kotura Inc for the project.

A September 2005 Computerworld article went over some of the history of Proximity Communication research at Sun.

Tags : Proximity Communication Chip Interconnect