Intel establishes Integrated Photonics Research Center
Intel announced that its Intel Lab has recently established an Interconnect Integrated Photonics Research Center, which will bring together world-renowned photonics and circuit researchers from multiple universities, promote the research and development of integrated photonics in data centers, paving the way for computing interconnection in the next ten years.
The center is mainly responsible for accelerating the innovation of optical I/O technology in performance expansion and integration, focusing on photonic technology and its devices, MOS circuits and link architecture, as well as package integration and fiber coupling. Optical I/O is significantly better than electrical in key performance indicators such as arrival rate, bandwidth density, power consumption, and delay. In order to improve optical performance while reducing power consumption and cost, further innovation is required in several aspects.
Intel said that data-centric workloads are increasing every day in the data center, and are currently approaching the I/O power wall and I/O bandwidth gap, which will greatly hinder performance expansion. As computing bandwidth requirements continue to increase, electrical I/O cannot keep up, leading to I/O power-performance scaling is not keeping pace and will soon limit available power for compute operations. By tightly integrating photonics with CMOS silicon, it is possible to systematically eliminate barriers across cost, power, and size constraints, bring the transformative power of optical interconnection to server packaging, and comprehensively reshape the optically connected data center network and architecture.
