Integration of optical I/O with organic chip packages

With the ongoing progress in chip scaling, the data flow to and from chip packages is increasing accordingly. The simultaneous increase of channel count and channel speed in an essentially constant form factor becomes a more and more demanding challenge. The resulting I/O-bottleneck is considered to be a major limiting factor for the overall performance of future chip packages and computing systems. Optical interconnects offer both increased channel density as well as longer link reach at high frequencies. Our current work focuses on integrating optical I/O with standard organic packages in order to maximize the aggregate data flow to and from such packages. We present a novel approach for attaching an electro-optical conversion module directly on top of the organic chip package, together with experimental results of a first prototype implementation.