TSMC, Broadcom & NVIDIA Alliance Reportedly Set to Advance Silicon Photonics R&D

[T0@st]

Taiwan's Economic Daily reckons that a freshly formed partnership between TSMC, Broadcom, and NVIDIA will result in the development of cutting-edge silicon photonics. The likes of IBM, Intel and various academic institutes are already deep into their own research and development processes, but the alleged new alliance is said to focus on advancing AI computer hardware. The report cites a significant allocation of—roughly 200—TSMC staffers onto R&D involving the integration of silicon photonic technologies into high performance computing (HPC) solutions. They are very likely hoping that the usage of optical interconnects (on a silicon medium) will result in greater data transfer rates between and within microchips. Other benefits include longer transmission distances and a lower consumption of power.

TSMC vice president Yu Zhenhua has placed emphasis on innovation, in a similar fashion to his boss, within the development process (industry-wide): "If we can provide a good silicon photonics integrated system, we can solve the two key issues of energy efficiency and AI computing power. This will be a new one...Paradigm shift. We may be at the beginning of a new era." The firm is facing unprecedented demand from its clients—it hopes to further expand its advanced chip packaging capacity to address these issues by late 2024. A shift away from the limitations of "conventional electric" data transmissions could bring next generation AI compute GPUs onto the market by 2025.



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[AnotherReader]

This is one area where these companies are well behind Intel. Intel has been selling products using silicon photonics for almost seven years.

 

[claes]

Interconnect has been a thing for decades, that Broadcom and nvidia have been involved with. This PR is talking about photonics on silicon, ie on a single device rather than between devices, which I don’t think Intel (or anyone?) is doing yet, but I’m not data center person so don’t take my word for it

 

[AnotherReader]

Interconnect has been a thing for decades, that Broadcom and nvidia have been involved with. This PR is talking about photonics on silicon, ie on a single device rather than between devices, which I don’t think Intel (or anyone?) is doing yet, but I’m not data center person so don’t take my word for it

You're right. The state of the art is co-packaged silicon photonics which still involves separate optical and electronic components.

 

[claes]

Neat stuff!

 

[A Computer Guy]

After reading this I had a weird thoughts of daisychaning cpus with fiber optic cable and perhaps RGB coming out of the CPU so you can get a bit of backlighting behind the heatsink.

 

[Wirko]

As I understand it, no one is even trying to make photonics on the same silicon die with logic or memory. Think of procesor logic, DRAM and flash - two of them can be integrated on the same die but only with serious performance tradeoffs. That's also how photonics is incompatible in details such as number of layers and materials used.

The goal is to be able to manufacture photo-electric components using the (almost) same manufacturing technology. As one of the linked sources puts it, "Wafer-scale fabrication of photonic devices is enabled by silicon foundry manufacturing". Then, of course, comes co-packaging. At least that's what can be inferred from drawings and diagrams I've seen so far.