How Photonics Can Light the Way for Higher Performing Multi-Die Systems

By _Synopsys Blog

November 22, 2023

Multi-die systems are making big waves in the semiconductor industry. Through heterogeneous integration of dies in a single package, design teams are discovering new ways to breathe more life into Moore’s law. At the same time, these complex architectures are opening pathways to explore new types of components that can further optimize systems for power, performance, and area (PPA), such as photonics.

Photonics harness the speed of light for fast, low-power, high-capacity data transfer. A tremendous amount of data needs to be moved swiftly across different components in a multi-die system. Considering this, exploiting the advantages of light is one way to mitigate heat dissipation and energy consumption concerns while delivering fast data transmission. Simply put, for bandwidth-intensive designs such as high-performance computing (HPC) and AI/machine learning, copper interconnects burn up too much of the power budget. By overcoming some of the limitations of traditional electronic circuits, photonic ICs are ideally suited for this realm.

Technologies for heterogeneous integration make it possible to marry components of different process nodes and types, including electrical and photonic circuits. Read on to learn more about how integrating photonic components into multi-die systems can offer another answer to greater demands for bandwidth, energy efficiency, and density of next-generation chips.

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