The Intel Research Center for Integrated Photonics for Data Center Interconnects will bring together universities and well-known researchers
Rendering of the new integrated photonics research centre of Intel Labs. (Credit: Intel Corporation)
Intel Labs, the research arm of Intel, has launched an integrated photonics research centre for expediting optical input/output (I/O) technology innovation in performance scaling and integration.
Dubbed as Intel Research Center for Integrated Photonics for Data Center Interconnects, the new hub will bring together universities and well-known researchers.
The research centre’s focus will specifically be on photonics technology and devices, package integration and fibre coupling, and complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuits and link architecture.
Intel Labs PHY Research Lab senior principal engineer and director James Jaussi said: “At Intel Labs, we’re strong believers that no one organisation can successfully turn all the requisite innovations into research reality. By collaborating with some of the top scientific minds from across the United States, Intel is opening the doors for the advancement of integrated photonics for the next generation of compute interconnect.
“We look forward to working closely with these researchers to explore how we can overcome impending performance barriers.”
According to Intel, the ever-growing movement of data from server to server is challenging the capabilities of the currently available network infrastructure. The company said that the industry is rapidly getting close to the practical limits of electrical I/O performance.
With continued increase in demand, scaling of electrical I/O power-performance is not maintaining pace and will soon restrict available power for compute operations, said Intel.
The company said that the key focus of the new photonics research centre will be to overcome this performance barrier by integrating compute silicon and optical I/O.
The goal of the research is to explore a technology scaling direction that meets the needs for both energy efficiency and bandwidth performance for the coming decade and beyond.
Some of the projects to be part of the photonics research centre include heterogeneously integrated quantum dot lasers on silicon, nonvolatile reconfigurable optical switching network for high-bandwidth data communication, low-power optical transceivers enabled by duo-binary signalling and baud-rate clock recovery, and sub-150fJ/b optical transceivers for data centre interconnects among others.
Intel Labs is engaged in discovering and developing new technologies and forms of computing to unlock the exponential power of data.