Intel Labs Researcher Spotlight: James Jaussi and Integrated Photonics

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Highlights:

• James Jaussi, Senior PE and Director of the PHY Research Lab at Intel Labs, and his team perform integrated photonics research focused on reducing costs, size, and operating power to enable optical I/O integration into compute platforms.
• Research milestones include the miniaturization of photonics components, the generation of light with multiple wavelengths, and an industry-leading demonstration of an eight-wavelength optical transceiver.

Intel Labs pioneered silicon photonics to meet the growing demand for more efficient and resourceful network infrastructure for ever-increasing amounts of data. Now, Intel is paving the way for next-generation deployments and future innovations with Integrated Photonics.

Silicon photonics offers superior reach, bandwidth density, power consumption, and latency in high-speed networks and provides rack-to-rack connectivity for data center applications, including optical communications and telecommunications. Integrated photonics brings together the advantages of silicon photonics and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) circuits. By integrating the power of optical directly with compute, memory, and peripheral technologies, high bandwidth data can be moved throughout the entire network with significantly less power.

James Jaussi, Senior PE and Director of the PHY Research Lab at Intel Labs, and his team perform integrated photonics research focused on reducing costs, size, and operating power to optical I/O integration into compute platforms. Core technology building blocks under development include light generation, amplification, detection, and modulation, CMOS interface circuits, and package integration technology.

Regarding his work, Jaussi noted that “we see a real opportunity where photonics can provide twofold advantages. One, it can increase I/O bandwidth density (amount of bandwidth for a given IC package width). Two, it addresses some of the reach performance barriers that we see for electrical.”

Integrated Photonics Milestones

While discussing his team’s progress, Jaussi noted several key milestones along the way. First was the miniaturization of the photonics. Conventional silicon modulators are fairly large and costly to place on IC packages. However, Intel has developed micro-ring modulators, with less than 20 microns diameter in size, which have eliminated a key barrier to integrating silicon photonics onto a compute package. Where previously it was only possible to fit at most 10 to 20 devices on a package, now there is the potential to put hundreds of devices on a package.

Another key element is the generation of light with multiple wavelengths. “Bandwidth scalability is essential for us to increase I/O performance. An optical technique commonly utilized in the industry is wavelength division multiplexing, or the use of multiple colors of light or wavelengths of light. This enables additional data to be transmitted over a single fiber, increasing bandwidth density.” said Jaussi. He went on to explain “that in this instance, the micro ring and the laser work very well together; as multiple wavelengths are generated, the rings can be tuned to align to each independent color. From there, they can put independent data streams on each one of the colors, which sit within the same fiber. Thus, wavelength division multiplexing provides the capability to scale bandwidth on a per-fiber basis.” For example, using multiple wavelengths with independent data channels, a single fiber can support up to 1Tb/s of bandwidth.  

The heart of the research in the PHY Research Lab has been around the laser itself. In this area, the team has seen some significant developments. Primarily, they can take a production laser and engineer it to generate multiple wavelengths. He mentioned that with this last piece of the puzzle, “we have the ability to generate, the ability to modulate, and we have these key pieces that go hand in hand, all with minimal area requirements. Additionally, they are manufactured in a 300mm high volume fab.” With a small footprint and size, researchers can now truly consider integrating this into a compute package.

Most recently, Jaussi’s team has published their work on an industry-leading prototype demonstration of an optical transceiver that features an eight-wavelength integrated laser and optical amplifier. All eight wavelengths are simultaneously modulated for a total bandwidth of 256Gb/s. This advancement will enable the production of the optical source with the required performance for future high-volume applications, such as co-packaged optics and optical compute interconnect for emerging network-intensive workloads, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. Overall, Jaussi was proud to note that “we have the lasers, the modulators, and the CMOS circuitry. We now know how the whole system comes together and understand the integration requirements. It is an important milestone for us because of the investment we have made to realize it. At this point, we are confident in the direction that we're going and the overall capabilities of the technology.”

The Future of Integrated Photonics

Jaussi stated that ultimately, “our goal is to enable these optical capabilities to really unburden and change something that is constrained today. We’re pushing technology innovations to reduce power consumption while continuing to scale performance. This leads to potential changes to the data center network by enabling a path to flatten the network hierarchy, which would reduce network cost, latency, and power. Now, we can focus our research on optimizing and innovating on top of these potential network improvements.”

This burgeoning vein of photonics is already making leaps and bounds, and Intel Labs is excited to see where Jaussi and his team lead the industry on the journey toward industry-wide adoption of integrated photonics.

Learn more about Integrated Photonics:

Building Future Technologies on Light

Intel Labs Announces Integrated Photonics Research Advancement

Intel Advances Progress in Integrated Photonics for Data Centers