Optical Interconnects

There continues to be an increased demand for high bandwidth density optical interconnects for growing mega data centers, long-haul telecommunications, and peta/exa-scale high-performance computing. To satisfy this exponential growth in data traffic, the trend has been to scale mega-data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers, which underlies the concern for data center power consumption given increased ecological concerns and future environmental impact. It is estimated by 2030 that 8 – 21% of global power consumption will be directly attributed to data centers. To address the aforementioned issues, my colleagues and I developed a novel heterogeneous III-V/Si dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) architecture to address chip power consumption (< 1.5 pJ/bit) and increased transmission bandwidth (> 1 Tb/s) at 50 °C [9], [11], [12]. The heterogeneous platform described in this work has shown the technical capability and fabrication compatibility to integrate all building blocks, such as heterogeneous quantum dot optical frequency comb laser sources, wavelength (de-) interleavers, micro-ring modulators, photodetectors, and semiconductor optical amplifiers to form a space division multiplexing DWDM transceiver [13]. Further exploratory topics cover advanced “bonding + epitaxy” integration. This project is currently funded by DOE ARPA-E under the name ULTRALIT (Ultra-Energy-Efficient Integrate DWDM Optical Interconnect). I plan to further development efforts with ARPA-E, DOD entities, and HPE to facilitate technology for post-exa-scale systems.