Avicena partners with TSMC to make its microLED links

TSMC, the leading semiconductor foundry, will make the photo-detectors used for Avicena Tech’s microLED optical interconnect technology.

Christoph Pfistner

Avicena is developing an optical interface that uses hundreds of parallel fibre links - each link comprising a tiny LED tranmitter and a silicon photo-detector receiver - to deliver terabit-per-second (Tbps) data transfers.

Avicena is targeting its microLED-based interconnect, dubbed LightBundle, for artifical intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

The deal is a notable step for Avicena, aligning its technology with TSMC’s CMOS manufacturing prowess. The partnership will enable Avicena to transition its technology from in-house prototyping to high-volume production.

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Nubis' bandwidth-packed tiny optical engine

• Nubis Communications has revealed its ambitions to be an optical input-output (I/O) solutions provider
• Its tiny 1.6-terabit optical engine measures 5mm x 7.5mm
• The optical engine has a power consumption of below 4 picojoule/bit (pJ/b) and a bandwidth density of 0.5 terabits per millimetre.
• “Future systems will be I/O with an ASIC dangling off it.”

Nubis Communications has ended its period of secrecy to unveil an optical engine targeted at systems with demanding data input-output requirements.

Dan HardingThe start-up claims its optical engine delivers unmatched bandwidth density measured in terabits per millimetre (T/mm) and power consumption performance metrics.

“In the timeframe of founding the company [in 2020], it became obvious that the solution space [for our product] was machine learning-artificial intelligence,” says Dan Harding, the CEO of Nubis.

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Tencent makes its co-packaged optics move

• Tencent is the first hyperscaler to announce it is deploying a co-packaged optics switch chip

• Tencent will use Broadcom’s Humboldt that combines its 25.6-terabit Tomahawk 4 switch chip with four optical engines, each 3.2 terabit-per-second (Tbps)

Part 2: Broadcom's co-packaged optics 

Tencent will use Broadcom’s Tomahawk 4 switch chip co-packaged with optics for its data centres.

Manish Mehta

“We are now partnered with the hyperscaler to deploy this in a network,” says Manish Mehta, vice president of marketing and operations optical systems division, Broadcom. “This is a huge step for co-packaged optics overall.”

The Chinese hyperscaler will use Broadcom’s 25.6Tbps Tomahawk 4 Humboldt, a hybrid design where half of the chip’s input-output (I/O) is optical and half is the chip’s serialisers-deserialisers (serdes) that connect to pluggable modules on the switch’s front panel.

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