Intel cooperates with Japan's NTT to develop optoelectronic fusion semiconductors and receives 45 billion yen in government subsidies

According to the Nikkei News on January 29, Japanese telecom operator NTT and Intel will jointly develop the next generation of "optical and electronic fusion" semiconductors. The Japanese government will also invest 45 billion yen for this (IT House Note: currently about 2.182 billion yuan) RMB) subsidy.

NTT and Intel will work with semiconductor manufacturers to carry out technical cooperation for the mass production of integrated "optical and electronic fusion" technology equipment. Some manufacturers, including South Korean semiconductor giant SK Hynix, will also provide assistance, while the Japanese government will provide approximately 450 billion yen of support.

In recent years, how to build a new computing architecture and develop new artificial intelligence computing chips has become a hot topic at the forefront of international attention. Optical computing, which uses light waves as a carrier for information processing, has become a research hotspot in the scientific community due to its advantages such as high speed and low power consumption. However, the computing carrier changes from electricity to light, and it also needs to replace existing electronic devices to achieve system-level applications, which faces many difficulties.

In November last year, a research team from Tsinghua University in my country successfully broke through the physical bottleneck of traditional chips, creatively proposed a new computing framework for optoelectronic fusion, and developed the world's first fully analog optoelectronic intelligent computing chip (ACCEL).

Experimental results show that the computing power of this chip in intelligent visual target recognition tasks can reach more than 3,000 times that of current high-performance commercial chips. Using only hundreds of nanometer-level process precision, performance can be significantly improved compared to advanced process chips.

However, the Tsinghua University research team has only developed photoelectric fusion principle samples with specific computing functions, and there is an urgent need to further develop intelligent visual computing chips with general functions so that they can be widely used in practice.