A new research center established by Intel Labs this week aims to drive faster, more efficient compute interfaces by substituting electricity for light.

Modern computer components like memory, artificial intelligence accelerators, GPUs, and storage devices interface with each other over a complex lattice of electrical traces radiating out from the CPU socket. Unfortunately, as bandwidth demands grow exponentially with each subsequent generation, these electric interfaces are quickly becoming a bottleneck, James Jaussi, director of Intel Labs’ PHY Research Lab, told SDxCentral.

These bottlenecks manifest in two forms: declining bandwidth scalability, and increased power consumption required to support higher data rates.

This isn’t a new problem by any means. Electricity can only carry a signal so far before it degrades beyond recognition. This is why the world is connected by fiber optic bundles sometimes thousands of miles long and not the telegraph lines of old.

Intel’s Research Center for Integrated Photonics for Data Center Interconnects aims to address this impending reality, at least for compute platforms, by applying this same logic to compute interfaces.

More specifically, the research center, which is made up of researchers from leading academic institutions around the world, is developing optical input/output (I/O) technologies including silicon photonics, CMOS circuits and link architectures, package integration, and fiber coupling.

“Optical I/O has the potential to dramatically outperform electrical in the key performance metrics of reach, bandwidth density, power consumption, and latency,” the company claims.

Despite this potential, optical interfaces aren’t going to do away with copper interconnects any time soon, Jaussi notes, adding that these developments aren't going to happen overnight either. “There are going to be a lot of electrical traces that are going to remain within the platform,” he said.

“As you transition from one technology — which is electrical — to optical, it’s not sufficient to have a point solution that makes sense for that particular generation,” Jaussi added. “It really needs to be a technology that can last for multiple generations, and that’s what this research center is focused on.”

Intel is far from the only chipmaker pushing the envelope on data center interconnect technologies.

Late last year, Marvell spent $10 billion to acquire Inphi to strengthen its optoelectrical and co-packaged optical switching capabilities.

While modern networks have long since moved to fiber optics for improved bandwidth and efficiency, the technology is still optoelectrical, meaning the optical signal has to be converted to an electrical one before its processed.

Co-packaged optics shift the optical interface — typically contained in a pluggable module or line card — into the switching silicon package itself, thus eliminating several inches of copper which usually separates the silicon from the optic. By reducing the distance between the switch silicon and the optics from inches to millimeters, power consumption can be reduced by more than 30%, said Hugh Durdan, VP of network interconnect marketing at Inphi.

Intel’s goal is take co-packaged opticals a step further and embed the technology directly into the server package, Jaussi said.