Intel Announces Major Advance in Integrated Silicon Photonics

According to Intel Labsits innovation marks the new vanguard in increasing the communication capacity between processors in data centers and in networks.

Silicon photonics is a technique that combines semiconductor lasers with silicon integrated circuits. The main advantage is that it allows faster data transmission over greater distances than traditional electronics. According to Intel’s website, silicon photonics enables increased bandwidth, software-configurable access to compute and storage resources, as well as software-defined infrastructure to decouple hardware and software resources for data centers. disaggregated data.

Intel is a market leader in integrated photonics. Its current 100G transceivers have been available for five years, and the company is also starting to ship 400G transceivers, with 800G already on the calendar. To move forward, however, photonics must become more intimately integrated with silicon. It has already made progress in “copackaged optics,” but its ultimate goal is to develop fully integrated photonics, in which the photonics IC is directly connected to the rest of the computing.

Intel has developed a novel method to achieve this. The result is likely to be the development of a future photonic input/output interface with greater power efficiency, bandwidth, and range, according to Intel Labs.

The breakthrough revolves around the possibility of obtaining well-tuned power output together with homogeneous and densely spaced wavelengths. The improvements, according to Haisheng Rong, principal engineer at Intel Labs, can be achieved by using existing production and processing processes in Intel factories. This ensures a path to volume production of “next-generation co-packaged optics and optical computing connectivity at scale,” as he described it.

According to Intel Labs, the research demonstrates significant advances in integrated multiwavelength optics. For example, it has demonstrated an eight-wavelength distributed feedback laser array that is fully integrated on a silicon wafer and achieves power output uniformity and wavelength spacing uniformity that exceeds requirements. existing.

All of this means that Intel will soon be able to produce a fully integrated photonics optical source that meets the performance requirements of tomorrow’s high-volume, demanding applications. To meet these expectations, optical computing interconnects that can perform network-intensive tasks such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are needed. The laser array is built on Intel’s 300-millimeter silicon photonic fabrication process, providing the framework for scale production and widespread industrial use.

In particular, compared to conventional semiconductor lasers generated on three- or four-inch III-V wafer fabs, the new process provided greater wavelength uniformity. Furthermore, due to the tight integration of the lasers, the array maintained its channel spacing when the ambient temperature was changed.

The method will be used in a future optical computing interconnect chiplet product that will offer “high-performance, low-power connectivity between computing resources such as CPUs, GPUs, and memory,” according to Intel.

Illustration: Frame, presentation video, Intel Labs.