The broader impact/commercial potential of this PFI project is to introduce scalable silicon photonic switches with fast response time and low power consumption to enhance the capacity and efficiency of the interconnect networks in data centers. The global internet traffic has continued to grow exponentially, fueled by the increase of mobile devices and cloud-based applications for artificial intelligence, video streaming, social networking as well as enterprise compute/collaborate needs. A majority of the data traffic remains within the datacenter. The number of hyperscale datacenters will double in five years. Each of these hyperscale datacenters houses hundreds of thousands of servers and consumes 100 MW of power. Such growth is not sustainable without fundamental changes in how datacenter is designed. Scalable photonic switches with fast response time and low power consumption can improve the efficiency and performance of datacenters. Optical switching is agnostic to data rate, unlike the electrical packet switches in current networks. It enables programmable datacenter networks, allowing the network to adjust its topology to match the traffic patterns of applications.
The proposed project will accelerate the development and commercialization of scalable silicon photonic switches and make them widely available to datacenters and telecommunication industry. Current optical switches in the market are bulky, slow, and expensive. In this PFI-TT, we propose to replace the bulk optical switches with fully integrated (single chip) silicon photonic switches. Silicon photonics use complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) foundries to mass produce photonic integrated circuits at low cost, leveraging economies of scale of the multi-trillion-dollar microelectronics industry. We use micro-electro-mechanical-system (MEMS) actuation to dramatically reduce the optical insertion loss and power consumption. Silicon photonic switches with microsecond response time and low optical loss will revolutionize datacenter networks. The anticipated outputs of this program include a prototype switch with proven reliability and a strategy to scale up production. The ultimate goal is to spin out a new company building switching subsystems supplying to both datacenter and the telecommunications industry.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
