Ayar Labs’ TeraPhy chiplet nears volume production
Tuesday, December 15, 2020 at 10:21AM Moving data between processing nodes - whether servers in a data centre or specialised computing nodes used for supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) - is becoming a performance bottleneck.
Workloads continue to grow yet networking isn’t keeping pace with processing hardware, resulting in the inefficient use of costly hardware.
Networking also accounts for an increasing proportion of the overall power consumed by such computing systems.
These trends explain the increasing interest in placing optics alongside chips and co-packaging the two to boost input-output (I/O) capacity and reach.
At the ECOC 2020 exhibition and conference held virtually, start-up Ayar Labs showcased its first working TeraPHY, an optical I/O chiplet, manufactured using GlobalFoundries’ 45nm silicon-photonics process.
