Recent Advances in Low-Power Digital Signal Processing Technologies for Data Center Applications

The explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has resulted in an exponential growth of demand for bandwidth in datacenters. We have reached a point where this growth becomes limited by the power that can be physically supplied to the datacenters, imposing an important constraint on the hardware that can be deployed. Pluggable optical modules, enabled by low power DSPs, are used extensively for high-speed interconnects in datacenters. However, the explosive growth of bandwidth, constrained by a fixed power envelope, is a continuous challenge. Although other approaches, such as co-package optics and linear drive optics, are starting to appear, this paper focuses on recent innovations and tradeoffs that has allowed DSPs to keep pace with the bandwidth growth in intra-datacenter and inter-datacenter interconnect applications.