Highly Parallel Silicon Photonic Links with Integrated Kerr Frequency Combs

The rapid growth of data-intensive workloads such as deep learning and artificial intelligence has placed significant strain on the interconnects of high performance computing systems, presenting a looming bottleneck of significant societal concern. Furthermore, with the impending end of Moore's Law, continued reliance on transistor density scaling in compute nodes to compensate for this bottleneck will experience an abrupt halt in the coming decade. Optical interconnects provide an appealing path to mitigating this communication bottleneck through leveraging the favorable physical properties of light to increase bandwidth while simultaneously reducing energy consumption with distance-agnostic performance, in stark contrast to electrical signaling. In particular, silicon photonics presents an ideal platform for optical interconnects for a variety of economic, fundamental scientific, and engineering reasons; namely, (i) the chips are fabricated using the same mature complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) infrastructure used for microelectronic chips; (ii) the high index contrast between silicon and silicon dioxide permits micron-scale devices at telecommunication wavelengths