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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Teraboard (High density scalable optically interconnected Tb/s Board)

Teaser

Summary

TERABOARD proposes the demonstration of a scalable, low power, low cost photonic technology to sustain the continuous increase of bandwidth density by leveraging on combination of scalability and low energy consumption. TERABOARD is a complete solution for scalable low-energy optical interconnections to be used in multiple application scenarios, ranging from intra-board through intra-data center communication, such as high-speed switch/router line cards, baseband processing units in 5G radio base stations, and next generation data center multi-server blades. From the system point of view, TERABOARD is a new technology that enables very large aggregated bandwidth density (Tb/s/cm2) on board. Thus, the number of operations in a single board are increased, instead of achieving the same number of operations in many boards or in a rack. The most relevant advantage results in avoiding power supplying of multiple boards. The concentration of a large number of operations in a single board leads to a radical system innovation, reduction of total energy cost and reduction of hardware size and cost. The innovative solutions proposed by TERABOARD consist of developing advanced intra-board and edge interfaces, with ultra-high density and scalability in bandwidth, low insertion loss and low energy consumption. The target of energy cost per channel is 2.5 pJ/bit, with a manufacturing cost of 0.1 $/Gb/s in volumes. These indicators are 10 times better with respect to the commercial state of the art. The intra-board communication will be a novel concept based on a 3D passive interconnection platform with no intersections and no need of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM). To reduce the overall power consumption of a data center, intra-rack communications will avoid the use of WDM, cutting the fibers cost and the footprint needed by fiber connectors. In both intra-board and intra-rack communications, TERABOARD will demonstrate a 10-times reduction of required power with respect to present commercial solutions. The structure of TERABOARD project was chosen to strongly reinforce the cooperation among several research institutions and large companies, covering the full value chain from R&D to industrial product manufacturing to system applications. TERABOARD will directly contribute to strengthening European telecommunications capability and R&D pushing CMOS photonics integration density on a chip beyond the state of the art, in order to give a strategic benefit both at component and system levels. Thus, TERABOARD will guarantee not only support of competitiveness of European telecom industry at the technological level via strengthening its manufacturing base in photonics, but also will widen market opportunities in communication for data center arenas. TERABOARD will enable European telecom industry to stay at the forefront of electronics and photonics development and applications. Furthermore, the higher energy efficiency will be the main point toward the reduction of CO2 emissions. The reduction in power consumption enabled by the TERABOARD technology is achieved due to the lower power required to switch and keep on the networking apparatus, as well as lower power required for the cooling. The resulting 10-times reduction in power consumption will have a significant impact in reducing CO2 emissions.

Work performed

UP to M18, TERABOARD collected promising preliminary results. Toward the achievement of the 3D passive interconnection platform and the concept demonstration of the silicon photonic chip pluggability, an innovative technology for the fabrication of low loss femtosecond laser written vertical waveguides was developed, together with reliable methods for the fabrication of mirrors and horizontal waveguides to be included in the 3D passive interconnection platform. Important improvements have been accomplished on laser integration over the silicon photonic chips by means of a novel stamping technology (transfer printing). Silicon photonic components efficiently operating up to 56 Gb/s within 1 pJ/bit energy consumption were developed, and a SiGe modulator capable of this speed was made available for Europractice Photonics multi-project wafer runs. Specific electronic integrated circuits designed to drive the silicon photonic components are in progress, with target specific consumption of 1 pJ/bit (1 mW/GHz).

Final results

TERABOARD is on the way of achieving progress which clearly goes beyond the state of the art. This is going to happen with the 3D passive interconnection platform which is one main objective of the project, and with the highly efficient silicon photonic components and electronic integrated circuits which are being developed within the project. TERABOARD is pushing the photonics integrated circuits based on silicon photonics technology toward the new frontier of 3D stacking to implement optical redistribution layers, suited for cost-effective volume manufacturing on semiconductor production lines merged with dielectric-based 3D photonic integration platforms. The proposed 3D interconnection technology will support radically new data center architectures requiring a reduced number of boards and backplanes, thus reducing the overall data center size and cost. This second challenge will reinforce the European industrial technology leadership through a relevant increase of market presence in high-bitrate optical communications for emerging exascale cloud data center, wireless and HPC applications. These two targets, once reached, will pave the way to Pb/s network throughput, enabled by scalable Tb/s board interfaces for optical intra-data centre transmission, and will let Europe to be more efficient and digital.