Integrated Electronic Photonic Chip Sandwich Could Drive Data Centers
Engineers at Caltech and the University of Southampton have teamed up to design an electronics chip integrated with a photonics chip.
Engineers from Caltech, in partnership with the University of Southampton, have designed an electronics chip with an integrated photonics chip that's capable of transmitting high-speed data with minimal heat. The team states that the two-chip sandwich could influence the future of data centers that handle large amounts of data communication. The towers of servers in data centers are notorious for the amount of heat generated while processing data, which means the new chip could reduce that heat, allowing for increased data throughput.
"Every time you are on a video call, stream a movie or play an online video game, you're routing data back and forth through a data center to be processed," Caltech graduate student Arian Hashemi Talkhooncheh explains. "There are more than 2,700 data centers in the US and more than 8,000 worldwide, with towers of servers stacked on top of each other to manage the load of thousands of terabytes of data going in and out every second."
Data processing is done using electronic chips (or processors), while photonic chips can transmit that data efficiently. Combining them was no easy task, but engineering an interface to combine those chips was more difficult. To combine the two, the team designed each from the ground up and co-optimized them to work together.
The R&D took four years to complete, from its initial idea to in-house testing. The resulting optimized interface can transmit 100 gigabits of data per second while producing just 2.4 pico-Joules per transmitted bit. The resulting chip sandwich improves the electro-optical power efficiency of the transmission by a factor of 3.6 compared to current technologies.