Die to Die Solutions for Optical Chiplets

Kevin Donnelly, VP, Eliyan

During the last two decades, increases in compute performance in FLOPs has far outpaced the increases in interconnect bandwidth, leading to limitations in system performance often described as the I-O Wall. System designers are evaluating a wide range of optical technologies to enable optical scale-up and scale-out solutions for datacenters. Optical solutions connect to XPUs via electrical interfaces, and as optics move ever closer to the XPU with  co-packaged optics (CPO), designers are evaluating different die-to-die (D2D) interfaces for these ASIC-to-optical connections. This talk will describe several electrical-to-optical connection examples with D2D solutions including UCIe, BoW, and 3D PHY interfaces, and show how these D2D interfaces can enable different system-level solutions. D2D interfaces can efficiently connect ASICs to optical devices, providing improved performance at lower power than traditional off-package SerDes interfaces to optical modules.