Developments in the field of hybrid electronics, which combine traditional and optical technologies, have been going on for a long time. So, the Ayar Labs startup and its developments became known . Now the company is ready to release a serial product, which they told about .
Efforts focused on building an optical interconnect system to replace current SerDes technologies. The company's first official product was the Terabit PHY chiplet, or TeraPHY for short.
The chiplet uses the 45nm RF SOI process and has an area of ββless than 50mm2. TeraPHY communicates with other components in the package via 24 AIB channels - the maximum throughput is 960 Gt / s (gigatransfer per second). Electron-optical conversion is carried out by special waveguides with a system of ring resonators. There are 10 of them in the chiplet, the total throughput reaches 2,56 Tbps.
An in-house developed SuperNova laser is used as an external radiation source. The current version of SuperNova supports up to 16 wavelengths and up to 256 channels with a total bandwidth of 8,192 Tbps.
So far we are talking about prototypes, but the existing Stratix 10 samples with new chiplets on board are quite functional. Using TeraPHY will improve energy efficiency by increasing throughput while maintaining the same power consumption.
The future of the technology is quite bright, since there are already samples of lasers with 32 wavelengths and active development of a laser using 64 wavelengths. Ayar Labs announced its plans back at SC19, and its partner sample delivery program will begin at the beginning of the first quarter of this year.
Source: 3dnews.ru