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SAN FRANCISCO - Network computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. researchers have reportedly 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, the company said it has eliminated the need for the tiny wires, pads and solder points that now connect chips on printed circuit boards that help make up computer systems.
 
According to industry analysts, the development could mean sending data among chips up to 100 times faster than current top transmission rates on traditional semiconductor-chip interconnects, and 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, analysts said.

Sun Micro reportedly already holds seven patents on the new design and will seek to capitalize on them commercially.

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, the New York Times recently reported.

Sun researchers Ivan Sutherland, Robert Drost, and Robert Hopkins announced the development in a paper presented at the recent Custom Integrated Circuits Conference in San Jose.
 
In their paper, the trio wrote 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.

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.

A spokesman for the Silicon Valley-based company declined to comment specifically on when systems using the connection design might be rolled out, but said he would expect to see a commercial use of the technology "sooner than five years."

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