Research project

TERABOARD (DFM.AD002.044)

Thematic area

Physical sciences and technologies of matter

Project area

Scienze e tecnologie quantistiche (DFM.AD002)

Structure responsible for the research project

Institute for photonics and nanotechnologies (IFN)

Project manager

ROBERTO OSELLAME
Phone number: 02-23996075
Email: roberto.osellame@polimi.it

Abstract

Optical communications are becoming always more relevant because of the continuous growth of the requiested bandwidth. In the last decade we assisted a continuous growing of transport and metro netwotks, presently the bottleneck is in the processing of the huge amount of data constituted by the growing number of users, the capacity of the content that is exchanged and the convergence of Telecom and Datacom. This accumulation of data are elaborated and redirected within data centers with a continuous growing of traffic congestion. The continuous growth of traffic require therefore a roadmap of bandwidth density growth that necessarily has to be scalable on the timeframe of several years. To this point photonics plays a crucial role that is always more pervasive. However a major limiting factor is also arising from the energy cost and latency accumulated by the need of aggregation to route signals. To limitate this effect is necessary to make possible data exchange and processing without or with limited aggregation. Teraboard project consists in developing a full intra data center photonic platform for intraboard, intrarack and intradata center optical communications.

Goals

Overall objective of the TERABOARD project consists in developing intraboard and edge interfaces. The interfaces should enable ultra-high density and scalable bandwidth, together with low insertion loss. The target for energy cost per channel is of 2.5pJ/bit and for the manufacturing cost is of 0.1$/Gb/s in volumes. These target values are 10x reduction with respect to the commercial state of the art. The intraboard communication will be a novel concept based on 3D passive interconnection platform with no intersections and no need of WDM multiplexing.

Start date of activity

01/12/2015

Keywords

photonics integrated circuits, Si photonics, 3D integration

Last update: 08/11/2024