The research division of the chip giant, Intel Labs, has confirmed a very important advance in its research dedicated to integrated photonics that, in theory, will allow it to jump to the next phase and increase bandwidth of communications between the computing silicon of data centers and networks.
Recent results from the latest Intel Labs research have resulted in significant advances applied to integrated multiwavelength optics, including the demonstration of a set of distributed feedback lasers (DFB, for its acronym in English) of eight wavelengths that is fully embedded on a silicon wafer. This design provides excellent output power uniformity of +/- 0.25 decibels (dB), and wavelength spacing uniformity of ±6.5%, values that exceed anything that exists right now in the sector.
Haisheng Rong, Chief Senior Engineer at Intel Labs, commented:
“This new research shows that matched output power can be achieved with uniform and widely spaced wavelengths. And, importantly, this can be done using existing manufacturing and process controls in Intel factories, thus ensuring a safe path to volume production of the next generation of co-packaged optics and computing optical interconnect. to scale”.
Thanks to this advance it will be possible to production of the optical source with the necessary performance to make the leap to future applications of big volume, such as co-packaged optics and optical computing interconnection in emerging network-intensive workloads, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. This array of lasers has been created under Intel’s 300-millimeter silicon photonic fabrication process, which will facilitate that leap to large-scale production.
This represents an important advance, but to understand it better we must remember that optical connections began to replace copper cables in 1980, mainly due to to the great bandwidth that this material could reach. Since then, the technology has become increasingly efficient thanks to the reduction in the size and cost of components, which has made it possible to achieve impressive advances in recent years thanks to the use of optical interconnects for network solutions.
Something similar is happening with electrical interconnections. With the increasing performance limitations of electrical interconnection, the integration of silicon and optical circuits in the same package leaves us with an interesting promise on the table, a future input/output interface capable of offering greater energy efficiency and greater range, and the best thing is that Intel has been able to manufacture them using existing technologies, with all that this implies in terms of production and costs.
The latest optical co-packaging solutions using Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology are very promising as they allow increase bandwidth and significantly reduce the physical size of the chips photonics
However, until now it has been very difficult to produce DWDM light sources with uniform wavelength spacing and power. As well, this new advance ensures a consistent separation of wavelengths of light sources while maintaining a uniform power output, thereby meeting one of the requirements of optical computer networking and DWDM communication, i.e. solving one of the most important problems in achieving that photon-silicon integration.
We can find more information on the official Intel website.
