IBM has integrated multiple optical components alongside electrical circuits using 90nm semiconductor process technology.
Essentially, IBM has successfully added a variety of silicon nanophotonics components, such as wavelength division multiplexers (WDM), modulators, and detectors, alongside CMOS electrical circuitry using a conventional semiconductor foundry.
IBM’s CMOS nanophotonics used transceivers exceeding 25 Gbps per channel. IBM said its integration is capable of feeding a number of parallel optical data streams into a single fiber by utilizing compact on-chip wavelength-division multiplexing devices. The ability to multiplex large data streams at high data rates will allow future scaling of optical communications capable of delivering terabytes of data between distant parts of computer systems.
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/39641.wss
- In October 2012, IBM announced a breakthrough in building a semiconductor using carbon nanotubes instead of silicon. IBM researchers created a device consisting of more than ten thousand working transistors made of nano-sized tubes of carbon. Standard semiconductor processes were used to fabricate the device. IBM has previously demonstrated that carbon nanotube transistors can operate as excellent switches at molecular dimensions of less than ten nanometers – less than half the size of the leading silicon technology.