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Ecosystem Driven Standards Working Groups  
Ecosystem Driven Standards are not only are about driving standards at your company's level, but understanding one level up and one level down in the supply chain for more satisfied customers and suppliers.  If you do not see your company as a "driver", you still want to make sure your standards needs are in the mix so you can better understand and contribute to what is possible or what is not possible. 

Silicon Photonics - Manufacturing at Scale

The standard enables equipment and processes, making it common across customers in one segment and then across other segment markets.  We open the market with standardization to streamline cost effectiveness of packaging, testing, and validation. 

 

Approximately 80% of capital in a new PIC design goes to packaging.  This effort allows the industry to follow the CMOS route.  Standardizing the packaging process will allow a vibrant ecosystem to grow and ultimately emulating the success story of CMOS technology.

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The goal is to collaborate with foundries and enable a “tops down approach” to integrate the packaging guidelines into Silicon Photonics PDKs. Secondly, the see the industrial ecosystem for testing and validating the photonic integrated circuits. 

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Focus:

  • silicon photonics based co-packaged optics (CPO)

  • leveraging AI high volume manufacturability

  • standardization of photonics chiplets inclusion in package

  • test interface and strategy

  • reliability for CPO, manufacturing volume and test tools

  • working together within a proven ecosystem to drive standards
     

Ecosystem Standards Drive:

  • Silicon Photonics Packaging Rules

  • PDK - Foundry Design Rules

  • ADK - Assembly design rules for packaging

  • Fiber Attach Specs - (keep out zones, IL/ORL, Power)

  • Test methodologies
     

 

Multi-Core Fiber - Rack Density Management 

​Multi-Core Fiber has been around for over 10+ years. Over the next five years , hyperscale data centers are expected to significantly scale up the number of nodes in AI clusters to tens of thousands. This growth will require a substantial advancement in fiber optic cabling to support the massive connectivity required. Key innovations in fiber technology and connectivity will play a critical role in enabling this expansion.

 

Multicore Fiber (MCF) offers significantly enhanced bandwidth capacity compared to a conventional Data Center Network Advances single-mode fiber.  Conventional single-mode fiber has a single core carrying a single data stream. MCF has multiple independent cores within a single fiber strand, each capable of transmit ting a parallel optical data stream. 

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Focus:

  • GPU to GPU (Transceiver to Transceiver) interconnects

  • Silicon photonics interconnects

  • Switch to switch with co-packaged optics

  • DC to DC links on campus or off campus

  • Disaggregated interconnects for intra rack

 

Ecosystem Standards Drive:​

  • Increased Bandwidth and Materials Reduction(fiber jackets, reels, conduit space etc.)

  • Faster deployment

  • Easier decommissioning

  • Lower power consumption for point-to-point connectivity

  • Lower BOM costs

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Optical Waveguide Interconnect System - Removal of Copper Traces​

The Optical Waveguide Interconnect System working group creates standards for optical waveguide-embedded-PCB to solve the imminent bandwidth and power issues through removing copper traces. Traditional PCB design tools are based on schematic diagrams composed of electrical copper traces and components, where optical components are populated and interconnection between optical components are implemented by an overlay of fibers.  As using embedded optical waveguides instead of fibers needs to be part of the PCB manufacturing process, there are additional steps to utilize the current EDA tools with polymeric film based optical waveguide. (Formerly called "MWIS" Group)

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Focus:

  • Consolidating implementation groups achievements into single target system

  • "Chip to chip" optical waveguide interconnect system channel

  • "Chip to module" optical waveguide interconnect system channel   

  • Optimized system channel
     

Ecosystem Standards Drive:

  • Optical waveguide interconnect system "chip to chip"/"chip to module" alternative to the IEEE 802.3 Attachment Unit Interface (AUI) Chip to Chip (C2C)/Chip to Module (C2M) standard

  • Optical waveguide interconnect system long reach/very short reach alternative to the OIF Common Electrical I/O (CEI) Long Reach (LR)/Very Short Reach (VSR) standard

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Under Consideration

Near Packaged Optics (NPO) - High Performance Computing Power Reduction

With “near packaged optics”, the transceiver is in its own package as close the ASIC as possible, to keep the electrical lengths short.  The power consumption for off chip signaling is consuming too much power of the power budget.  Moving to the optical domain reduces the amount of power for “off chip signaling” (chip to chip, chip to board, chip to faceplate). 

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Focus:

  • Lasers will be built into every ASIC chip and fibers or optical waveguides will carry the signal between chips. 

  • Thermally decouple the ASIC from the transceiver

  • There are no currently standards for NPO 

  • This would be utilized in data center and HPC environments

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Ecosystem Standards Drive:

  • Reduction in the amount of power necessary for data centers and HPCs

  • Demonstrations utilizing the current model of ecosystem (stand alone components assembled by OSATs)

  • White papers, best design practice documents or industry cohesive standards​

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