Intel Corporation has achieved a revolutionary milestone in integrated photonics technology for high-speed data transmission. At the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2024, Intel's Integrated Photonics Solutions (IPS) Group demonstrated the industry's most advanced and first-ever fully integrated optical compute interconnect (OCI) chiplet co-packaged with an Intel CPU and running live data. Intel's OCI chiplet represents a leap forward in high-bandwidth interconnect by enabling co-packaged optical input/output (I/O) in emerging AI infrastructure for data centers and high performance computing (HPC) applications.

"The ever-increasing movement of data from server to server is straining the capabilities of today's data center infrastructure, and current solutions are rapidly approaching the practical limits of electrical I/O performance. However, Intel's groundbreaking achievement empowers customers to seamlessly integrate co-packaged silicon photonics interconnect solutions into next-generation compute systems. Our OCI chiplet boosts bandwidth, reduces power consumption and increases reach, enabling ML workload acceleration that promises to revolutionize high-performance AI infrastructure," said Thomas Liljeberg, senior director, Product Management and Strategy, Integrated Photonics Solutions (IPS) Group.

Ansys announced it is collaborating with GF to deliver innovative, unique, and feature-rich solutions to solve some of the biggest challenges facing data centers today. With data being generated at a record pace, causing a surge of power consumption in data centers globally, there is an ever-increasing need for innovative solutions to accelerate data transmission while optimizing energy efficiency. To meet such rising demands, GF is focused on developing groundbreaking semiconductor solutions that leverage the potential of photons—instead of electrons—to transfer and move data, maintaining GF's position as a leader in the rapidly growing optical networking space.

GF Fotonix is GF's next generation, widely disruptive, monolithic platform. GF Fotonix is the first in the industry to combine its differentiated 300 mm photonics and RF-CMOS features on a silicon wafer, delivering best-in-class performance at scale. "Our engagement with Ansys is another example of how GF is partnering with the ecosystem leaders to deliver innovative, time to market solutions for our customers," said Mike Cadigan, senior vice president for Customer Design Enablement, GF. "By coupling GF Fotonix with Ansys' industry-leading simulation solutions, we are reaching new levels in photonic chip design. With support for Verilog-A simulation and process-enabled custom design, designers have greater modeling capabilities to meet their performance, power, and density requirements."

Alphabet has announced that its prototype implementation of a laser-based communications system, Project Taara, successfully managed to transmit over 700 Terabytes of data over a 5 km distance. The system successfully transmitted the information across the Congo river in the African continent, connecting the towns of Brazzaville (Republic of Congo) and Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo). The system aims to deliver fiber-optic-level communications speed in locations where infrastructure investment cost for a fiber optics solution is economically unfeasible. In this case, Project Taara delivered the high-speed connection where 250 miles of fiber network cabling would need to be laid out to achieve the same effect. It should also allow for cheaper infrastructure development in well-developed cities.

The project has taken the Free Space Optical Communications technology developed for Project Loon, one of Alphabet's explorations on delivering high-speed internet connections to rural areas whilst using stratospheric helium balloons. Alphabet said that its Project Taara link was operational for 20 days during the test period, where it achieved a signal availability level of 99.9% - meaning that it was practically uninterrupted. The laser system features self-adjustment capabilities that aim to circumvent weather and wildlife elements, which allow the lasers to not only boost the laser strength if required, but also to adjust the output and input laser dishes by up to +/- 5 degrees. The system's current development stage should allows for "a light beam the width of a chopstick accurately enough to hit a 5-centimeter target that's 10 kilometers away."

A joint team of researchers from Australia's Monash, Swinburne and RMIT universities have developed a new interpretation of the current fiber optic infrastructure - one that managed to deliver a 44.2 Tbps throughput via existing optical lines. The achievement, which delivers speeds in excess of 1 million times greater than the average home users' internet speed (50.2 megabits per second for the US), paves the way for upgrades on the existing fiber optic network that hugely decrease costs compared to the need to implement a wholly new infrastructure.

The feat was achieved using a microcomb - a device which is able to replace a number of the currently in-use lasers for the transmission of information. A microcomb is an optical device that generates very sharp and equidistant frequency lines in a tiny microphotonic chip, and it allows researchers to make use of not only the presence of light - as it's done with the usual lasers found in optical equipment - but the lack of light as well, in what researchers call "dark" pulses of light. While nowadays no user would ever need transmission speeds in the order of the 44.2 Tbps achieved by the researchers, advancement in processing, communication technologies, and supercomputing will eventually make use of these - and even higher - throughputs, which is why it's so important that this technology has been developed on top of existing infrastructure.