Abstract

Arrayed Waveguide Grating Router (AWGR)-based interconnections for Multi-Socket Server Boards (MSBs) have been identified as a promising solution to replace the electrical interconnects in glueless MSBs towards boosting processing performance. In this article, we present an 8-socket glueless optical flat-topology Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM)-based point-to-point (P2P) interconnect pursued within the H2020 ICT project ICT-STREAMS and we report on our latest achievements in the deployment of the constituent silicon (Si)-photonic transmitter and routing building blocks, exploiting experimentally obtained performance metrics for analyzing the 8-socket chip-to-chip (C2C) connectivity in terms of throughput and energy efficiency. We demonstrate an 8-channel WDM Si-photonic microring-based transmitter (Tx) capable of providing 400 (8 × 50) Gb/s non-return-to-zero (NRZ) Tx capacity and an 8 × 8 Coarse-WDM (CWDM) Si-AWGR with verified cyclic data routing capability in O-band. Following an overview of our recently demonstrated crosstalk (XT)-aware wavelength allocation scheme, that enables fully-loaded AWGR-based interconnects even for typical sub-optimal XT values of silicon integrated CWDM AWGRs, we validate the performance of a full-scale 8-socket interconnect architecture through physical layer simulations exploiting experimentally-verified simulation models for the underlying Si-photonic Tx and routing circuits. This analysis reveals a total aggregate capacity of 1.4 Tb/s for an 8-socket interconnect when operating with 25 Gb/s line-rates, which can scale to 2.8 Tb/s at an energy efficiency of just 5.02 pJ/bit by exploiting the experimentally verified building block performance at 50 Gb/s line. This highlights the perspectives for up to 69% energy savings compared to the standard QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) typically employed in electronic glueless MSB interconnects, while scaling the single-hop flat connectivity from 4- to 8-socket interconnection systems.

Temperature and wavelength drift tolerant WDM transmission and routing in on-chip silicon photonic interconnects

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400 Gb/s O-band silicon photonic transmitter for intra-datacenter optical interconnects

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Silicon photonic 8 × 8 cyclic Arrayed Waveguide Grating Router for O-band on-chip communication

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400-Gb/s optical transmitter and receiver modules for on-board interconnects using polymer waveguide arrays

Jau-Ji Jou, Tien-Tsorng Shih, and Chun-Lin Chiu
OSA Continuum 1(2) 658-667 (2018)

4-channel 200 Gb/s WDM O-band silicon photonic transceiver sub-assembly

Miltiadis Moralis-Pegios, Stelios Pitris, Theoni Alexoudi, Nikos Terzenidis, Hannes Ramon, Joris Lambrecht, Johan Bauwelinck, Xin Yin, Yoojin Ban, Peter de Heyn, Joris van Campenhout, Tobias Lamprecht, Andreas Lehnman, and Nikos Pleros
Opt. Express 28(4) 5706-5714 (2020)