Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES)
Abstract
The Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES) program developed 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 advanced 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 developed photonic input/output (I/O) capability for application-specific integrated circuits and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that are widely used in advanced DoD sensors and radio frequency systems. The goal of the program was improving I/O bandwidth density, efficiency, and reach by more than 100X to enable disruptive DoD system parallelism and performance scaling. As PIPES technologies matured, they proliferated into central processing units, graphical processing units, and emerging tensor-flow processing units that impacted a wide range of dual-use applications including artificial intelligence, machine learning, large scale emulation, and high-performance computing. To further mature the technology and assure domestic manufacturing ecosystem for DoD use, key PIPES technologies transitioned to the OUSD(R&E) program Co-Packaged Analog-Drive High-Bandwidth Optical Input/Output (KANAGAWA).
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2025
- Source ID
- 19b7231fe1ed9d49e89474f89c123fde