Monday, September 13, 2021

Avicena demos multi-Tbps LED interconnect

At this week's European Conference for Optical Communications (ECOC) 2021, Avicena Tech Corp. is demonstrating its LightBundle multi-Tbps LED-based chip-to-chip interconnect technology.

The Avicena LightBundle achieves order-of-magnitude improvements in power dissipation and density over any other interconnect technology up to a reach of 10 meters. LightBundle™ is purpose-built for multi-Tbps chip-to-chip interconnects in distributed computing, processor-to-memory disaggregation, and other advanced computing applications. Avicena is based in Mountain View, California. 

Avicena's LightBundle is based on arrays of novel GaN high-speed micro-emitters with a reach of up to 10m. The technology leverages the microLED display manufacturing ecosystem and is fully compatible with high performance CMOS ICs. The company’s CROMEs are about an order of magnitude faster than the current state-of-the-art LEDs. At 200 parallel lanes this extrapolates to an aggregate link bandwidth of 2Tbps with a bandwidth density of 10Tbps/mm2.

“All of this is changing with the recent progress in optical emitter technology driven by advances in the display industry,” says Bardia Pezeshki, founder and CEO of Avicena. “We have developed super-efficient, high-density optical transmitters based on emitter technology from the display industry. These innovative devices would have been impractical just a few years ago. Our optimized devices and materials support 10Gbps links per lane over -40°C to +125°C temperature with excellent reliability. We refer to our new optical sources as Cavity-Reinforced Optical Micro-Emitters or CROMEs. We connect CROME arrays with CMOS compatible PDs using multi-core fiber bundles to create massively parallel interconnects with 100s of parallel lanes with a density of 10Tbps/mm2 over a reach of up to 10m. We call this new class of optical interconnect the Avicena LightBundle.”

https://avicena.tech/