Abstract
The interconnect fabric is taking an ever-more dominant portion of the power budget and optical interconnects are already used today within datacenters for rack to rack interconnection to overcome the limits of electrical signaling. However, the switches interconnecting these racks have inadequate capacity to continue to scale with CMOS-based technology due to fundamental limitation of on-chip interconnects and power consumption and pin-count of scheduler ASICs . Furthermore, not only does the switch fabric require significant power, but the conversion from the optical signal to electrical and back again (OEO) adds a significant amount of power and space. In this talk, I will highlight a unique switching technology that we are currently working on, which allows for high-radix and high-bandwidth, that is not achievable in conventional electrical interconnects, while dissipating very low power. We achieve these diametrically opposing goals by utilizing the large-bandwidth enabled by optics fabricated in a cost-efficient CMOS platform. I will also discuss our approach to integrating these two technologies using a wafer scale integration technique.
Biography
Theogarajan is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests include combining the processing power of electronics with the versatility of synthetic chemistry to develop neural prosthetic devices, integrating CMOS circuits with nanoscale sensors to develop novel biosensors and developing simple synthetic mimics of biological function to gain a deeper physical understanding of biological phenomena. Before starting his Ph.D, he worked for Intel for 5 years where he was part of the Pentium 4 design team. He has published both in the field of electrical engineering and polymer chemistry and holds 4 patents.