11.1 A 1.7pJ/b 112Gb/s XSR Transceiver for Intra Package Communication in 7nm FinFET Technology
COVID 19 sparked a paradigm shift for businesses, education, and social life. The measures taken have emphasized, more than ever, the importance of on line communication platforms. Online streaming services, education tools, and workplace communication tools all experienced a multifold increase in demand in 2020 as the world population was under a lockdown. Service providers' ability to meet these demands relies on the capacity of mega scale data centers (MSDC) Hence, capacity and bandwidth of MSDCs are expected to grow exponentially. The transition from 12.8 to 51.2Tb/s switches for data centers leaf and spine is underway, and is expected to deploy starting in $2021\sim 2022$ [1] Unfortunately, the increase of switch throughput comes with serious area, yield, and power limitations. To mitigate the problem, recent advances in chiplets and multi die technologies for high throughput switches show a promising increase in yield and lower solution cost. Another direction is silicon photonic and ASIC co integration, which allows for package throughput well beyond the electrical interface capability.
2021 IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC)