Light In A Package


Silicon photonics is gaining significant traction inside the data center, but creating a simpler method of packaging the laser with other circuitry remains a stumbling block for cutting costs and using this technology across a wider swath of applications. Progress does appear to be on the horizon, even though exact time frames remain unclear. The advantages of light in communications are wel... » read more

NVDIMM Market Buoyed By Evolving Data Center Demands


The NVDIMM market A recent report published by Transparency Market Research (TMR) confirms that the global Non-Volatile Dual In-line Memory Module (NVDIMM) market is being propelled by an increased demand for advanced data center infrastructure. Indeed, NVDIMMs offer fault-tolerant data integrity, while simultaneously optimizing the performance of storage and cache, as well as indexing, messag... » read more

Integrated Photonics (Part 1)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the status of integrated photonics with Twan Korthorst, CEO for PhoeniX Software; Gilles Lamant, distinguished engineer for [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Bill De Vries, director of marketing for Lumerical Solutions; and Brett Attaway, director of EPDA solutions at AIM Photonics, SUNY Polytechnic Institute. What follows are excerpts of tha... » read more

Rethinking SSDs In Data Centers


Semiconductors that control how data gets on and off solid-state drives (SSDs) inside of data centers are having a moment in the sun. This surge in interest involves much more than just the SSD device. It leverages an entire ecosystem, starting with system architects and design engineers, who must figure out the best paths for data flow on- and off-chip and through a system. It also includes... » read more

1.41 ‘Giga-Searches’ Per Second?


Data centers, which are the engines of the Internet, are responsible for the vast amount of traffic that flows across the network. And, it’s no revelation; our digital universe and data center traffic will reach 10.4 zettabytes (ZB) by 2019, the equivalent to 144 trillion hours of streaming music. As apps and services become more data hungry, the higher the allowance for data traffic we’re... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: April 11


High-efficiency silicon photodetector Electrical engineers at the University of California, Davis, and W&WSens Devices, Inc. built a new type of high-efficiency photodetector that could be monolithically integrated with silicon electronics. The new detector uses tapered holes in a silicon wafer to divert photons sideways, preserving the speed of thin-layer silicon and the efficiency o... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 7


Infrared links for data centers Researchers at Penn State, Stony Brook University and Carnegie Mellon University developed a free space optical link for communication in data centers using infrared lasers and receivers mounted on top of data center racks. According to Mohsen Kavehrad, professor of electrical engineering at Penn State, "It uses a very inexpensive lens, we get a very narrow... » read more

Why Wait To Double Your Network Bandwidth?


10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) has been the economical workhorse high-performance interconnect for data center server networks for years. 40GbE and 100GbE of course are just derivatives of 10GbE, with 4 x 10GbE channels or 10 x 10GbE channels. 10GbE, therefore, has been the building block for server racks everywhere. But with the massive explosion of data from the Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT) a... » read more

IoT, Architectures, And Security


Mike Muller, CTO of [getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about security, IoT market changes, and future technology requirements. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Security is a growing problem. How do we deal with it? Muller: However fast the world is moving, if you look at fundamental hardware and system design, it’s ru... » read more

Faster SerDes For More Efficient Data Centers


The evolving data center presents an imposing set of challenges for system architects as Dennard Scaling fades and Moore’s Law wanes. These include an exponential increase in data, shifting architectural bottlenecks and a never-ending demand for higher performance within the same power and thermal envelopes. The Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data analytics, in-memory computing and machine ... » read more

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