Road to Commercialization for Optical Chip-to-Chip Interconnects
The communications industry has an I/O bottleneck problem. When data is unable to be moved into or out of a chip or chiplet at a rate that matches or exceeds the rate at which processing occurs, a backlog is created in the data stream, such that processing/storage conducted in other chips or chiplets is stalled while they await the data. The I/O bottleneck has implications for power consumption in that a significant portion of the power that should be spent on computation and processing is instead used to push data through the system.
This is a significant problem for systems that deal with large amounts of potentially unstructured data but that require low latency to function, such as natural-language–processing algorithms.
