Adaptive microcombs for innovative connectivity in datacenter applications and optical clocks

Introduction

The rampant growth of ICT applications, such as AI, is moving an increasing amount of computing resources to datacentres. Datacentres are responsible for approximately three quarters of the internet protocol data in the world. The continuous increase in data traffic and bandwidth demands are challenging the status quo of the datacentre interconnect architecture.

Challenge

The outstanding challenge for the next decade is finding scalable and efficient solutions to enable the bandwidth density that will be needed.

Enabling Technology

Co-packaged optics (CPO) is the enabling technology to drive this shift in the computational efficiency paradigm. It is projected to have the largest forecasted CAGR in silicon photonics from 2022 to 2026, with potential multi-billion dollar revenues beyond 2030.

Key Features of CPO

CPO is based on decreasing the distance of power-hungry electrical interfaces by co-integrating optoelectronic modules on the same interposers.

Requirements for Optical Edge Bandwidth Density

In order to drive the scaling in optical edge bandwidth density, multi-wavelength laser sources for dense wavelength division multiplexing will be needed. However, state-of-the-art commercial solutions face fundamental scaling issues.

Project Overview

Amica builds upon a breakthrough wafer-scalable, super-efficient microcomb technology to realize critical demonstrators in WDM CPO. The project aims at petabit-per-second aggregate speeds in a mass-manufacturable platform with an unprecedented combination of:

1. Channel count
2. Efficiency
3. Line spacing
4. Power per line

Consortium

The consortium brings a synergetic effort among:

• An industrial leader in datacentre interconnects and high-performance computing
• Academic partners with complementary expertise in integrated photonics
• An emerging startup that owns the intellectual property rights for commercialization

The team is complemented with an innovation office to lead the tech-to-market transition, and two associated partners who will help test the technology for emerging markets beyond telecom.