SBIR Phase I: Developing a Packaging Solution for Low-energy High-performance Microphotonics for Data Center Communications

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to enable ultra high bandwidth energy-efficient optical interconnects in supercomputers and data centers. By resolving network bandwidth bottlenecks, the project enables greater disaggregation and more efficient utilization of compute servers and memory, which dominate costs in data centers. Decreasing communication energy use will address 30% of energy consumption in data centers, which are expected to use 130 billion kilowatt hours per year by 2020 in the US alone. This means that, if all US data centers were to adopt this technology for all interconnects by 2020, they would reduce energy use by 37 billion kWh annually. Commercially, the total addressable market for a product which can address this problem is $24B and grows at 20% per year. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will focus on the development of electro-optic packaging and a multi-wavelength laser source for super-high bandwidth-density optics-enabled CMOS chips. These technologies, which are not available today, are essential to the production of a 1 Tb/s optical interconnect using chips built in a commercial CMOS foundry. Development of these capabilities will enable a plug-and-play 1 Tb/s demonstration product, so that potential customers can test its capabilities in their own data center and supercomputer systems, and ultimately will enable scaling production of a commercial product. The anticipated effects will be to make compute resources more efficient, preventing the need to build more data centers, and reducing the growing costs and environmental footprint of computer infrastructure.