The semiconductor industry is witnessing a new arms race, with researchers constantly seeking faster and more efficient ways to connect the building blocks of modern chips. In this race, European researchers at CEA-Leti, a leading technology research institute, are making strides with their innovative optical interposers called Starac. This technology, based on silicon photonics, holds the potential to revolutionize how chiplets, the individual components that make up modern processors, communicate with each other.
Starac utilizes silicon photonics, a technology that leverages the properties of light to transmit data at incredibly high speeds. This unique approach allows Starac to integrate electronic and photonic circuitry into a single package, creating a highly efficient data routing and processing system. Unlike traditional interconnects, Starac employs a dedicated Optical Network-on-Chip (ONoC) to manage high-speed data transmission between chiplets, eliminating the need for intermediate hops through complex ring topology structures.
While Starac is still under development, CEA-Leti anticipates significant benefits. The researchers predict that the technology will drastically reduce latency, increase bandwidth, and improve power efficiency. Jean Charbonnier, R&D project leader at CEA-Leti, explains the importance of this development: “In a large computing system, there are multiple compute chiplets with cores and high-bandwidth memories. It’s easy to transfer data between a core and a nearby memory, but when a core needs data from a more distant memory, a complex series of operations is required. Starac significantly reduces this delay because the intrinsic latency of light within our ONoC is remarkably low compared to traditional architectures.”
CEA-Leti is actively seeking industrial partnerships to further develop Starac and address key process and packaging challenges. The team believes this technology could have a significant impact on the future of semiconductor design, enabling faster, more efficient, and more powerful computing systems.
The advent of Starac highlights the ongoing innovation in the semiconductor industry, where advancements in silicon photonics and optical interposers are paving the way for a new era of computing power and efficiency.
