Intel opens research center to accelerate ‘optical I/O innovations’

Intel has opened a research center to investigate ‘technology innovations’ of optical input/output using integrated photonic chips. With this, the company believes it will overcome the practical performance limits of current electrical I/O.

According to Intel, the increasing data traffic between servers is putting increasing pressure on the current network infrastructure. The scaling of electrical I/O in power and performance cannot keep up with this increasing demand for data center interconnects, the company claims. According to the company, this will limit the available power for compute operations in the future. The company believes this “performance barrier” can be overcome by integrating compute silicon and optical I/O technology, and plans to explore this in the new center.

In addition, Intel says optical I/O has the potential to surpass the electrical I/O variant in terms of range, bandwidth density, power consumption and latency. The company also wants to investigate this further. “Further innovations are necessary on several fronts to broaden optical performance while reducing power and cost,” added Intel.

According to Intel, the new center will bring together renowned researchers from several US universities to accelerate technological innovations in performance scaling and optical I/O integration. For this purpose, integrated photonic chips, cmos interface circuits and link architecture are used. These are, according to Intel, “essential” to achieve the required performance to replace electrical I/O with optical I/O.