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John O | November 2018

DARPA research project explores integrating optical signaling at the chip-level


By Josh Perry, Editor
[email protected]

 

The PIPES (Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability) program from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was created to develop high-bandwidth optical signaling technologies for digital microelectronics.

 


PIPES is a new DARPA program seeking to design optical signaling technologies for microelectronics. (Wikimedia Commons)

 

“Working across three technical areas, PIPES aims to develop and embed integrated optical transceiver capabilities into cutting-edge MCMs and create advanced optical packaging and switching technologies to address the data movement demands of highly parallel systems,” an announcement from DARPA read. “The efficient, high-bandwidth, package-level photonic signaling developed through PIPES will be important to a number of emerging applications for both the commercial and defense sectors.”

 

The program will work on the creation of high-performance optical input-output (I/O) packaged with advanced integrated circuits (ICs) and the development of an ecosystem that promotes the wider deployment of these technologies.

 

PIPES will also “investigate novel component technologies and advanced link concepts for disruptive approaches to highly scalable, in-package optical I/O for unprecedented throughput.” The third technical area “will focus on the creation of low-loss optical packaging approaches to enable high channel density and port counts, as well as reconfigurable, low-power optical switching technologies.”

 

This program, according to the announcement, is based on the increasing use of parallel processing to meet performance demands and the struggle for electrical links to manage the large amounts of energy needed to move data between ICs.

 

“Expanding the use of optical rather than electrical components for data transfer could help significantly reduce energy consumption while increasing data capacity, enabling the advancement of massive parallelism,” the announcement explained.

 

An article about the new PIPES program from Military and Aerospace Electronics added, “While optical signaling is common today in such systems at the board and rack levels, it has not yet been integrated within component switch chips, central processing units (CPUs), and graphical processing units (GPUs).”

 

Read the full program description at https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=9493e4e64b87072050593af7d0237683&tab=core&_cview=0.

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