Abstract
Oracle Labs does industrial research in a broad set of areas of importance to the company. This seminar will give an overview of the Labs' projects, from silicon photonics and VLSI research to software areas like virtual machines and Domain-Specific Languages.
Optical interconnects play an integral role in the interconnect hierarchy of large-scale digital computing systems. Today, systems use vertical cavity laser modules soldered to circuit boards containing the processing and switching chips. A future vision for a many-chip module based on silicon photonic interposers closely stitches together tens of chips and provide a dense and efficient communication infrastructure. We review the guiding design principles for this “macrochip” design and describe the energy, loss, and area budgets for a break-through optical link.
Biography
James Mitchell has a B.S. from the University of Waterloo (1966) and a Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University (1971). He has been a Senior Fellow at Xerox PARC (1971-1984), a Senior Visiting Fellow At Cambridge University (1980-81), and Director of R&D at Acorn Computer, plc (U.K.) (1984-1988). At Sun Microsystems (1988-2003). He is currently Vice President, Photonics, Interconnects and Packaging at Oracle Labs. Dr. Mitchell has worked on programming language design & implementation (Mesa, Euclid, C++, Java), interactive programming systems, dynamic interpretation & compilation, document preparation systems, user interface design, distributed transactional file systems, distributed object-oriented operating systems, high-performance computer architecture, microprocessor design, and microelectronics packaging and interconnects.
Dr. A. V. Krishnamoorthy is Oracle’s Chief Technologist, Photonics and an Architect and Principle Investigator for the Oracle Labs DARPA UNIC initiative on silicon “photonics-to-the-processor”.Previously, he was a Distinguished Engineer and Director at Sun Microsystems responsible for advanced optical inter-connect and silicon photonics development. He also spent several years as CTO and President of AraLight, a Lucent technologies spinout developing high-density parallel optical products and technologies. Prior to that he was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Lucent New Ventures group, and before that a member of technical staff in the AdvancedPhotonics research department at Bell Labs, in Holmdel, NJ. He has worked over two decades on the integration of photonic devices with silicon CMOS circuits and on building switching and computing sub-systems based on these components - including electro-optic modulators on silicon, quantum well devices, VCSELs, and, most recently, Si/Ge photonics. He has published over 200 technical papers and 8 book chapters, has presented over 80 conference invited and plenary talks, and holds over 75 US patents. He has served as member or chair of over 35 international conferences, and as guest editor for several technical journals. His honors include the IEEE Distinguished Lecturer award, the ICO international prize in Optics, Eta Kappa Nu’s outstanding engineer citation, the Chairman’s Award from Sun Microsystems, and Best Paper at the Intl. Symposium on Microelectronics. He is a distinguished member of Tau Beta Pi and is a fellow of the OSA and IEEE.