The direction of the chip industry is moving towards multi-chiplets. The new research thus presented a statement for interconnecting chipsets via low-latency optical interposers.
Proposals for the optical interconnection of chiplets appear more and more often, especially when designing a technique that will be energy-efficient and have the lowest possible latency. A chiplet is actually a combination of several chips that are integrated into one case. But these chiplets need to be connected in some way.
The optical interposers are called Starac and their use of silicon photonics is what makes this technology so unique. Active optical interposers have combined electronics and photonic circuits into one, enabling complex routing and data processing. In addition to this, this technology includes ONoC (Optical Network-on-Chip), which is responsible for high-speed data transfer between chips without unnecessary complexities.
The Starac technology has not yet been implemented and tested, so we cannot definitively say how much of a performance increase it will bring. CEA-Leti claims that this technology will actually reduce latency, provide more bandwidth and increase energy efficiency by huge margins. But how it will really be will be revealed only after time.
Source: pctuning.cz
