Nubis' bandwidth-packed tiny optical engine

• Nubis Communications has revealed its ambitions to be an optical input-output (I/O) solutions provider
• Its tiny 1.6-terabit optical engine measures 5mm x 7.5mm
• The optical engine has a power consumption of below 4 picojoule/bit (pJ/b) and a bandwidth density of 0.5 terabits per millimetre.
• “Future systems will be I/O with an ASIC dangling off it.”

Nubis Communications has ended its period of secrecy to unveil an optical engine targeted at systems with demanding data input-output requirements.

Dan HardingThe start-up claims its optical engine delivers unmatched bandwidth density measured in terabits per millimetre (T/mm) and power consumption performance metrics.

“In the timeframe of founding the company [in 2020], it became obvious that the solution space [for our product] was machine learning-artificial intelligence,” says Dan Harding, the CEO of Nubis.

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Compute vendors set to drive optical I/O innovation

Part 2: Data centre and high-performance computing trends

Professor Vladimir Stojanovic has an engaging mix of roles.

When he is not a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, he is the chief architect at optical interconnect start-up, Ayar Labs.

Professor Vladimir Stojanovic

Until recently Stojanovic spent four days each week at Ayar Labs. But last year, more of his week was spent at Berkeley.

Stojanovic is a co-author of a 2015 Nature paper that detailed a monolithic electronic-photonics technology. The paper described a technological first: how a RISC-V processor communicated with the outside world using optical rather than electronic interfaces. 

It is this technology that led to the founding of Ayar Labs.

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Waiting for buses: PCI Express 6.0 to arrive on time

• PCI Express 6.0 (PCIe 6.0) continues the trend of doubling the speed of the point-to-point bus every 3 years.
• PCIe 6.0 uses PAM-4 signalling for the first time to achieve 64 giga-transfers per second (GT/s).
• Given the importance of the bus for interconnect standards such as the Compute Express Link (CXL) that supports disaggregation, the new bus can’t come fast enough for server vendors.

The PCI Express 6.0 specification is expected to be completed early next year.

Richard Solomon

So says Richard Solomon, vice-chair of the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) which oversees the long-established PCI Express (PCIe) standard, and that has nearly 900 member companies.

The first announced products will then follow later next year while IP blocks supporting the 6.0 standard exist now.

When the work to develop the point-to-point communications standard was announced in 2019, developing lanes capable of 64 giga transfers-per-second (GT/s) in just two years was deemed ambitious, especially given 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) would be adopted for the first time.

But Solomon says the global pandemic may have benefitted development due to engineers working from home and spending more time on the standard while demand from applications such as storage and artificial intelligence (AI)/ machine learning have been driving factors.

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Microchip’s compact, low-power 1.6-terabit PHY

Microchip Technology’s latest physical layer (PHY) chip has been developed for next-generation line cards.

The PM6200 Meta-DX2L (the ‘L’ is for light) 1.6-terabit chip is implemented using TSMC's 6nm CMOS process. It is Microchip’s first PHY to use 112-gigabit PAM-4 (4-level pulse-amplitude modulation) serialiser/ deserialisers (serdes) interfaces.

Stephen Docking

Microchip’s existing 16nm CMOS Meta-DX1 PHY devices are rated at 1.2 terabits and use 56-gigabit PAM-4 serdes.

System vendors developing line cards that double the capacity of their switch, router or transport systems are being challenged by space and power constraints, says Microchip. To this aim, the company has streamlined the Meta-DX2L to create a compact, lower-power chip.

“One of the things we have focussed on is the overall footprint of our [IC] design to ensure that people can realise their cards as they go to the 112-gigabit PAM-4 generation,” says Stephen Docking, manager, product marketing, communications business unit at Microchip.

The company says the resulting package measures 23x30mm and reduces the power per port by 35 per cent compared to the Meta-DX1.

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Making optical networking feel like cycling downhill

BT’s chief architect, Neil McRae, is a fervent believer in the internet, a technology built on the continual progress of optical networking. He discussed both topics during his invited talk at the recent OFC 2021 virtual conference and exhibition.

Neil McRae’s advocacy of the internet as an educational tool for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds stems from his childhood experiences.

Neil McRae

“When I was a kid, I lived in a deprived area and the only thing that I could do was go to the library,” says McRae, chief architect and managing director for architecture and technology strategy at BT.

His first thought on discovering the internet was just how much there was to read.

“If I’m honest, everything I’ve learnt in technology has been pretty much self-taught,” says McRae.

This is why he so values the internet. It has given him a career where he has travelled widely and worked with talented and creative people.

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The compound complexity of co-packaged optics

Part 1: The OIF’s co-packaging initiative

Large-scale data centres consume huge amounts of power; one building on a data centre campus can consume 100MW. But there is a limit as to the overall power that can be supplied.

Jeff Hutchins

The challenge facing data centre operators is that networking, used to link the equipment inside the data centre, continues to consume more and more power.

That means less power remains for the servers; the compute that does the revenue-generating work.

This is forcing a rethink regarding networking and explains the growing interest in co-packaged optics, a technique that effectively adds optical input-output (I/O) to a chip.

Two industry organisations - the OIF and The Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) - have each started work to identify the requirements needed for co-packaged optics adoption.

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AI: “It is an astonishing time to be a technologist.”

Want to master artificial intelligence (AI) techniques? A new book, The Supervised Learning Workshop, teaches you how to create machine-learning models using the Python programming language. A conversation with the co-author, Blaine Bateman.

Blaine Bateman is a business strategy consultant, helping companies identify growth strategies and opportunities.

Several years ago he decided to focus on data analysis or, more accurately, predictive analytics using machine learning.

“I started to see that clients had lots of data, frequently they didn’t know anything about it and they weren’t using it,” he says. “At the same time, I started to see that AI and machine learning were really on the uptick.”

Machine learning work is also rewarding, he says: “You build stuff and when you get it to work, you do something that helps someone.”

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