The Future of Short Reach Interconnect

The unprecedented information explosion and its increasing demands on data traffic and processing are pushing a rapid and diverse evolution in short reach interconnect technologies. In the background of this race, CMOS technology is not providing the usual node over node boost in performance to help SerDes developers cope with higher bandwidth and data rates. Breakthroughs in high speed electrical interconnect and new approaches in optical interconnect, such SiPho, NPO (near package optics) and CPO (co-packaged optics) promise improved performance, energy efficiency and density. What are the specific challenges that new and emerging applications such as AI and HPC are posing on interconnect? How various interconnect technologies are going to respond to the need for die disaggregation and multi-die IC products? The focus of this paper is to provide some directions and an underlying logic to help navigate this very complex technology landscape.