Photonics eBook：光子学如何影响数据中心的数据传输

What it is, why it’s important, and how it’s impacting the movement of data.

AI has created a crisis in the data center. The amount of data that needs to be processed and stored has pushed compute and memory density far beyond what anyone thought possible even a few years ago. But how to move that data back and forth quickly and efficiently between processors and memory remains a work in progress.

While the chip industry was built around the ability to move electrons through wires, there has long been a recognition that at some point photons would become the better choice for moving data at, well, the speed of light. That time has finally arrived.

Still, what sounds good in theory has proved to be far more complicated in practice. Just plugging optical cables into server racks was considered revolutionary a decade ago. Harnessing light, controlling its movement, protecting signals from various types of noise, and translating signals from electrical to optical and back to electrical were the stuff of science fiction.

Many elements and technologies are required to enable optical data movement. So far, most of the focus has been on connections between servers in a rack, and between racks, but in the future optical signals will move to the package level, and eventually much closer to where data is actually processed.

This eBook offers insights into what’s involved in photonics design, what’s changing (or at least what we know so far), and how those changes will affect semiconductor and electronic design in the future.

Click on the first image below to read the photonics eBook.

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Technical Advisory Board:

• Aftkhar Aslam, CEO of YieldWerx
• Vishal Chandrasekar, head of product management at Ayar Labs
• Tom Daspit, product engineering manager at Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries
• Dr. Mina Esmaeelpour, assistant professor, electrical and computer engineering department at the Missouri University of Science and Technology
• Hamed Gholami Derami, business development engineer, packaging solutions at Brewer Science
• Gilles Lamant, distinguished engineer, Virtuoso platform architect at Cadence
• Julio Marcos, product specialist, AI interconnect at Keysight Technologies
• Julien Muller, product management director at Synopsys
• Jigesh Patel, principal engineer, photonic systems and circuits at Synopsys
• Adam Reid, executive director, R&D at Synopsys
• Sander Roosendaal, director, R&D at Synopsys
• Ahsan Uddin, application consultant at Advantest

More Semiconductor Engineering ebooks:

• Chiplet Fundamentals For Engineers
• On-Die And In-Package Interconnects
• Advanced Packaging Fundamentals
• Memory Fundamentals for Engineers

Bryon Moyer

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Bryon Moyer is a technology editor at Semiconductor Engineering.