Photos: Inside IBM's Zurich research lab
Summary: The scanning tunnelling microscope is one of the Nobel prize-winning technical breakthroughs to come out of IBM's Zurich laboratory. ZDNet UK went to have a peek at what the lab is working on now, as it gears up to celebrate its 50th birthday
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Another area under examination is "the I/O bottleneck". As Dr Christian Menolfi who specialises in I/O links explained, you can see the issue simply by looking at the back of an I/O processor.
"Pin counts are getting very large," Dr Menolfi said. "We are looking at needing 1,000 just for I/O. The complications of the I/O pins are growing faster than the number of pins. This is the package bottleneck."
The answer, according to Dr Menolfi, is advanced, multi-channel signalling (shown in the top-left display). By arranging the I/O channels in the optimum configuration the Zurich researchers hope to guarantee maximum data throughput.
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