Making On-Chip Photonics Manufacturable


Key Takeaways: System-level energy and bandwidth pressures are pulling optics into the package faster than the manufacturing flow can mature. Photonics combines front-end fabrication, materials, thermal, cleanliness, and test into one problem that can’t be solved domain by domain. Test is moving upstream because discovering an optical failure after final assembly forfeits every goo... » read more

Building A Production-Ready Optically Connected Rack For AI Scale-Up


By Nandita Aggarwal and Nicholas Chang As AI models drive compute demand, servers keep getting bigger. Rack‑scale AI systems (such as the 72-GPU systems from NVIDIA or AMD) enable many GPUs to work together through system-level optimization. They push beyond the limits of single-chip performance and meet the soaring compute needs of the AI era. But this is just the beginning. The next s... » read more

1 Megawatt Racks In Data Centers


The demand for performance in an AI data center is causing a huge spike in the amount of power being consumed. Within a rack are a half-dozen SoC components housed in different types of advanced packages and connected with an assortment of blazing-fast interface IP and optical signaling. Manmeet Walia, director of product management for mixed-signal PHY IP in the Synopsys Solutions Group, talks... » read more

Lasers Are The Heartbeat Of The Optical AI Data Center


Last month we discussed how all interconnects will be optical in the data center in five years, but that's only part of the story. Every optical interconnect needs a laser. The laser provides the carrier, which is modulated and manipulated by the transmitter optical engine through fibers and connectors to the receiver optical engine. Each fiber, connector, and photonics device that the laser... » read more

Potential Route To Photonic FPCA Using NV Low-Loss Phase Change Material (Oxford)


A new technical paper, "Nonvolatile photonic field-programmable coupler array," was published by researchers at University of Oxford. Abstract "Programmable photonic networks carry out universal unitary functions by independently operating on the amplitude and phase of guided light. Exploiting the reconfigurability and spatiospectral degrees of freedom of these systems, the majority of stat... » read more

What’s Next for 2.5D Packaging?


Interposers and bridges, two of the key elements for interconnecting multiple chips and chiplets in an advanced package, are undergoing fundamental changes in how they're built and assembled. Interposers are becoming thicker and more complex, while bridges are being used to reduce the assembled cost. Both efforts are facing new challenges. Interposers are effectively platforms on which mu... » read more

Advanced Packaging: A Key Technology For The Next Generation Of Electronics


In recent years, advanced packaging has become much more important. While semiconductor manufacturers used to focus primarily on miniaturization and increasing the performance of individual chips, the focus is increasingly shifting to the system level: How can processor cores, memory, sensors, and wireless modules be integrated as efficiently, compactly, and powerfully as possible within a sing... » read more

Developing Next-Generation Integrated Optical Engines


By Susan Coleman and Emily Gerken Data demand is soaring worldwide as high-resolution video streaming, virtual reality, the Internet of Things (IoT), high-performance computing (HPC), and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) drive an insatiable appetite for data. As a result, networks and data centers face increasing pressure to expand bandwidth, reduce latency, and lower pow... » read more

Monolithic Integration of Air-Clad Optical Through-Silicon Waveguides in Silicon (TH Wildau et al.)


A new technical paper titled "Monolithically Integrated Optical Through-Silicon Waveguides for 3D Chip-to-Chip Photonic Interconnects" was published by researchers at the Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau, TU of Applied Sciences Mittelhessen, TU Ilmenau, Brandenburg University of Technology and Fraunhofer IPMS. Abstract "The scaling limitations of electrical interconnects are ... » read more

Wafer-Scale Heterogeneous Integration of Lithium Tantalate Films on Low-Loss Silicon Nitride Photonic ICs (EPFL, KIT, CAS, IPQ)


A new technical paper titled "Heterogeneously integrated lithium tantalate-on-silicon nitride modulators for high-speed communications" was published by researchers at EPFL, Chinese Academy of Sciences, IPQ and KIT. Abstract "Driven by the prospects of higher bandwidths for optical interconnects, integrated modulators involving materials beyond those available in silicon manufacturing incre... » read more

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