Geez if this works. It makes TCAMs free.
Ouch found the killer it takes up 0.1 mm^2 in area. That's a show stopper. Hopefully they can scale it down or use it for server infra.
Ouch found the killer it takes up 0.1 mm^2 in area. That's a show stopper. Hopefully they can scale it down or use it for server infra.
> bitcell achieves at least 10 GHz read, write, and compute operations entirely in the optical domain
> Validated on GlobalFoundries' 45SPCLO node
> X-pSRAM consumed 13.2 fJ energy per bit for XOR computation
Don't only think about area.
Put another way, the TLB in a CPU is relatively small and definitely a hotspot but you could estimate the TLB in a CPU at ≈ 0.0003 – 0.002 mm^2. which is ~50 times smaller then the single bit in this paper. To get to 10GHz we could just make 10 copies of an existing TLB operating at 1GHz and still have a ton of headroom. There is also a electro-optical conversion penalty that you need to take into account with most optical systems.
Not trying to be a Debbie downer. It's a cool result, no doubt incredibly useful for fully optical systems. Probably something really useful here for optical switching at the datacenter infrastructure level.
The ability here is that it can do storage and computation directly in the optical domain, this immensely reduces latency of crossing from photons to electrons and back to light again. Exactly what you want in a network switch.
I made no comment about it being used in a cpu.