Agent of change

Dave Welch on how entrepreneurial problem-solving skills can tackle some of society's biggest challenges

Dave Welch is best known for being the founder and chief innovation officer at Infinera, the optical equipment specialist. But he has a history of involvement in social causes.

In 2012, Welch went to court to fight for the educational rights of children in schools in California, a story covered by newspapers in the US and abroad and featured on the front cover of Time magazine.

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The long arm of PCI Express

Optical is being added as a second physical medium to the PCI Express (PCIe) data transfer protocol.

PCI Express is an electrical standard, but now the Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has created a working group to standardise PCIe’s delivery optically.

PCI-SIG is already developing copper cabling specifications for the PCI Express 5.0 and 6.0 standards.

Source: PCI-SIG

Since each generation of PCIe doubles the data transfer rate, PCI-SIG member companies want copper cabling to help with the design of high-speed PCIe interconnects on a printed circuit board (PCB), between PCBs, and between racks (see diagram).

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Modelling the Human Brain with specialised CPUs

Part 2: University of Manchester's Professor Steve Furber discusses the design considerations for developing hardware to mimic the workings of the human brain.

The designed hardware, the Arm-based Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNAker) chip, is being used to understand the working of the brain and for industrial applications to implement artificial intelligence (AI)

Professor Steve Furber

Steve Furber has spent his career researching computing systems but his interests have taken him on a path different to the mainstream.

As principal designer at Acorn Computers, he developed a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processor architecture when microprocessors used a complex instruction set.

The RISC design became the foundational architecture for the processor design company Arm.

As an academic, Furber explored asynchronous logic when the digital logic of commercial chips was all clock-driven.

He then took a turn towards AI during a period when AI research was in the doldrums.

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From 8-bit micros to modelling the brain

Part 1: An interview with computer scientist, Professor Steve Furber

Steve Furber is renowned for architecting the 32-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processor from Acorn Computer, which became the founding architecture for Arm.

Arm processors have played a recurring role in Furber's career. He and his team developed a clockless - asynchronous - version of the Arm, while a specialist Arm design has been the centrepiece building block for a project to develop a massively-parallel neural network computer.

Professor Steve Furber

Origins

I arrive at St Pancras International station early enough to have a coffee in the redeveloped St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel, the architecturally striking building dating back to the 19th century that is part of the station.

The train arrives on time at East Midlands Parkway, close to Nottingham, where Professor Steve Furber greets me and takes me to his home.

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The computing problem of our time: Moving data

• Celestial AI's Photonic Fabric technology can deliver up to 700 terabits per second of bidirectional bandwidth per chip package.
• The start-up has recently raised $100 million in funding.

The size of AI models that implement machine learning continue to grow staggeringly fast.

Such AI models are used for computer vision, large language models such as ChatGPT, and recommendation systems that rank items such as search results and music playlists.

David Lazovsky

The workhorse silicon used to build such AI models are graphics processing units (GPUs). GPU processing performance and their memory size may be advancing impressively but AI model growth is far outpacing their processing and input-output [I/O] capabilities.

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Using light to connect an AI processor’s cores

Lightelligence is using silicon photonics to connect 64 cores of its AI processor. But the company has bigger ambitions for its optical network-on-chip technology 

Lightelligence has unveiled its optical network-on-chip designed to scale multiprocessor designs.

The start-up’s first product showcasing the technology is the Hummingbird, a system-in-package that combines Lightelligence’s 64-core artificial intelligence (AI) processor and a silicon photonics chip linking the processor’s cores.

Maurice Steinman

A key issue impeding the scaling of computing resources is the ‘memory wall’ which refers to the growing gap between processor and memory speeds, causing processors to be idle as they wait for data to crunch.

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Fibre to everywhere

For years, passive optical networks (PON) were all about fibre-to-the-premise, particularly fibre-to-the-home. Japan, South Korea, and China led the market with massive PON deployments.

"Now the focus is on fibre-to-everywhere, whether it's a home, a business, a school, a university, an enterprise, a traffic light," says Julie Kunstler, chief analyst, broadband access intelligence at Omdia.

Julie Kunstler

Meanwhile, in the US, government funding is spurring fibre deployments, especially in underserved areas.

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