Imec: Breaking Connectivity Wall with Silicon Photonics and More

By Pat Brans, EETimes Europe (September 6, 2024)

In a discussion with EE Times Europe at ITF World 2024 in Antwerp, Belgium, imec researchers described their work to date with advanced silicon photonics to support the current and emerging generations of high-performance computing (HPC), as well as their investigations of other materials and processes to support HPC requirements further into the future.

Every two years, CPU and GPU performance is increasing by a factor of three, while interconnect bandwidth is increasing by a factor of 1.4, according to Filippo Ferraro, optical I/O program manager at imec. Performance is limited more by data pathways than by raw computing power, and the gap is widening.

Many research institutes and tech companies are looking to silicon photonics to break through this connectivity wall. Imec (Leuven, Belgium), for one, has a suite of silicon photonics technology that serves 800-Gbit/s and 1.6-Tbit/s (800G and 1.6T) pluggable optics, which its researchers say is sufficient to support today’s systems and one more generation in the future. The research organization applies a variety of tools, including high-density silicon waveguides, grating couplers, edge couplers to get the light in and out of the chips, and germanium photodetectors. They can translate an electrical signal into an optical signal, and they have several types of modulators to add information to that signal.

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