University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara)

The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) will develop and demonstrate a technology platform that integrates efficient photonic interfaces directly into chip "packages." The simultaneous design and packaging of photonics with electronics will enable higher bandwidth network switches that are much more energy efficient. Traditional electronic switches toggle connections between wires, each wire providing a different communication channel. Having a limited number of communication channels means that electronic switches can lead to “fat” hierarchical networks, consuming energy each time data has to travel through one switch to another. By developing a platform that directly integrates efficient photonics into first-level chip packages, layers of traditional network hierarchy can be eliminated, reducing the power, latency, and cost of datacenters. Photonic interconnects integrated directly into chip packages can enable switches with a much larger port count than traditional electronic switches. These new, larger switches will connect more servers using fewer levels of required switching. The team estimates that an improvement in the network metrics (either cost or power) will enable a more than linear improvement in the overall transactional efficiency because faster networks and faster endpoint data-rates can be deployed, reducing the total number of computational and storage systems necessary to satisfy user transactions.