A new technical paper titled “Design of Energy-Efficient Cross-coupled Differential Photonic-SRAM (pSRAM) Bitcell for High-Speed On-Chip Photonic Memory and Compute Systems” was published by researchers at University of Wisconsin–Madison, USC and GlobalFoundries.
Abstract
“In this work, we propose a novel differential photonic static random access memory (pSRAM) bitcell design using fabrication-friendly photonic components. The proposed pSRAM overcomes the key limitations of traditional electrical SRAMs, which struggle with speed and power efficiency due to increasing bitline/wordline capacitance and interconnect resistance associated with long electrical wires as technology scales. By utilizing cross-coupled micro-ring resonators and differential photodiode structures, along with optical waveguides instead of traditional wordlines and bitlines, our pSRAM exhibits high-speed, and energy-efficient performance. The pSRAM bitcell demonstrates a read/write speed of 40 GHz, with a switching (static) energy consumption of approximately 0.6 pJ (0.03 pJ) per bit and a footprint of 330×290 um^2 using the GlobalFoundries 45SPCLO process node. These bitcells can be arranged into a 2D memory array, enabling large-scale, on-chip photonic memory subsystems ideal for high-speed memory, data processing and computing applications.”
Find the technical paper here. March 2025.
Kaiser, Md Abdullah-Al, Sugeet Sunder, Clynn Mathew, Michal Rakowski, Ajey P. Jacob, and Akhilesh R. Jaiswal. “Design of Energy-Efficient Cross-coupled Differential Photonic-SRAM (pSRAM) Bitcell for High-Speed On-Chip Photonic Memory and Compute Systems.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.19544 (2025).
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