new Faster Chip Connection technology headed our way

[Joe]

A fast, new method for connecting computer chips could arrive in the next four years, a top chip engineer for Sun Microsystems said Monday in the US. The technology, called proximity communication, bypasses the wires that connect chips in current designs in favor of a direct connection between chips. "We could maybe see something in 2008 or 2009," Marc Tremblay, chief architect of Sun's scalable systems group, said at a meeting in San Francisco with reporters.

What does that mean for us well higher latency connections <and ram> and greater bandwith <MHz> connections would be possible

Proximity communication, which is working in Sun labs, uses a technology called capacitive coupling. In it the electrical state of a tiny patch of one chip is registered by a corresponding patch on another chip that's separated by a thin air gap.

The technology not only is much faster than regular wires, but its performance doesn't lag as the chips speed up, Tremblay said. Essentially, that means chip communications can participate in the same steady Moore's Law pace of processor improvements.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/hardware/0,2000061702,39182806,00.htm