Silicon photonics pioneer looks to ease the data centre networking problem

8th August 2016

Dr. Andrew Rickman, CEO of Rockley Photonics, believes the use of photonics will bring lower cost, more compact datacentres that consume less power.

“Operators are increasing the number of servers in their datacentres,” he noted, “and these can benefit from Moore’s Law, with more compute capacity for less cost. But the network equipment has two problems. When you double the number of servers you want to connect, the amount of network equipment needed increases by a factor of six. And Moore’s Law doesn’t help this I/O problem; the more transistors you put on a chip, the more it becomes a bottleneck in terms of the number of connections you can make.”

Source: http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/electronics-technology/silicon-photonic