Path to next generation AI optical interconnection: Fast and Narrow or Slow and wide?

Path to next generation AI optical interconnection: Fast and Narrow or Slow and wide?

Description: 

The explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) models and the emergence of large-scale AI clusters are driving unprecedented demands on communication bandwidth, energy efficiency, and system scalability. As AI infrastructure evolves toward disaggregated computing, memory-centric architectures, and exascale-scale deployments, data movement has become a dominant bottleneck in both training and inference systems. Optical interconnect technologies are widely recognized as a key enabler for overcoming the limitations of conventional electrical interconnects; however, fundamental architectural questions remain open.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from photonics, optical communications, AI hardware, networking, semiconductor technologies, and hyperscale computing to discuss future directions for AI interconnection systems. A central theme of the workshop is the debate between two contrasting approaches for scaling optical links: “Fast and Narrow,” which relies on increasingly higher baud rates, advanced modulation formats, and high-capacity optical channels, and “Slow and Wide,” which emphasizes massive parallelism through lower-speed, energy-efficient optical lanes, wavelength-division multiplexing, and highly distributed optical fabrics.

The workshop will explore challenges and opportunities spanning multiple technology layers, including silicon photonics, co-packaged optics, advanced packaging, optical switching, network architectures, AI workload characterization, and energy-efficient system design. Particular attention will be given to the co-optimization of photonic devices, interconnect architectures, and AI workloads, as well as the trade-offs among bandwidth density, latency, power consumption, scalability, reliability, and cost.

Through invited talks, panel discussions, and interactive debates, the workshop seeks to identify the most promising pathways toward next-generation AI optical infrastructures and establish a roadmap for future research and industrial development. The outcome will provide valuable insights for the photonics, networking, and AI communities as they shape the communication backbone of future intelligent computing systems.

Time: TBD

Venue: TBD

Organizers:

TBD

Speakers:

TBD