Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES)*
Abstract
*Previously part of Beyond Scaling - Access The Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES) program aims to develop optical signaling technologies for digital microelectronics. Distributed and parallel computing architectures are now pervasive across all size scales, from personal-scale multicore processing units to enterprise-scale high performance computing systems, and span application domains from consumer electronics to DoD systems. Increasingly, however, the benefits of parallelism are constrained not by the limits of computation at individual nodes but by the movement of data between nodes. PIPES will advance microelectronics capabilities by intimately integrating photonics with advanced integrated electronics to yield system connectivity with an unprecedented combination of high aggregate bandwidth, power efficiency, channel density, and link reach. Specifically, PIPES will develop photonic input/output (I/O) capability for application-specific integrated circuits and FPGAs, widely used in advanced DoD sensors and RF systems. The goal of the program is improving I/O bandwidth density, efficiency, and reach by >100x to enable disruptive DoD system parallelism and performance scaling. As PIPES technologies mature, they are anticipated to proliferate into central processing units, graphical processing units, and emerging tensor-flow processing units that will impact a wide range of dual-use applications including artificial intelligence, machine learning, large scale emulation, and high performance computing. Technologies from this program are intended for transition to larger scale commercial performers and the Services.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2021
- Source ID
- 1174449cc3419765223ee572ac66d941