Ayar Labs and Intel add optical input-output to an FPGA

Start-up Ayar Labs, working with Intel, has interfaced its TeraPHY optical chiplet to the chip giant’s Stratix10 FPGA.

Hugo SalehIntel has teamed with several partners in addition to Ayar Labs for its FPGA-based silicon-in-package design, part of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) project.  

Ayar Labs used the Hot Chips conference, held in Palo Alto, California in August, to detail its first TeraPHY chiplet product and its interface to the high-end FPGA.  

Origins

Ayar Labs was established to commercialise research that originated at MIT. The MIT team worked on integrating both photonics and electronics on a single die without changing the CMOS process.

The start-up has developed such building-block optical components in CMOS as a vertical coupler grating and a micro-ring resonator for modulation, while the electronic circuitry can be used to control and stabilise the ring resonator’s operation.  

Ayar Labs has also developed an external laser source that provides an external light source that can power up to 256 optical channels, each operating at either 16 to 32 gigabits-per-second (Gbps).

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Silicon photonics adds off-chip comms to a RISC-V processor

A group of researchers have developed a microprocessor that uses silicon photonics-based optics to send and receive data.

"For the first time a system - a microprocessor - has been able to communicate with the external world using something other than electronics," says Vladimir Stojanovic, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Vladimir Stojanovic

The microprocessor is the result of work that started at MIT nearly a decade ago as part of a project sponsored by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to investigate the integration of photonics and electronics for off-chip and even intra-chip communications.  

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