High-Speed Interconnect in Data Centers.

Dr. Xiaoning Ye is currently a Senior Principal Engineer at Data Center Group of Intel Corporation, specialized in high-speed interconnects. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in electronics engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1995 and 1997 respectively, and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology in 2000. Dr. Ye published over 100 technical papers in IEEE and other technical journals and conferences, with over 3600 citations. He holds 20 patents and a few more applications in the areas of high-speed signaling. He also led the development of two industry standards on interconnect characterization: IEEE 370, and IPC test method 2.5.5.14. Dr. Ye is currently serving as Vice President of Technical Services for IEEE EMC Society. He was Chair of the IEEE EMC Society Technical Advisory Committee from 2017 to 2020, and has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility since 2016. Dr. Ye received Technical achievement award of IEEE EMC Society in 2015, and was elevated to IEEE fellow in 2021.

The data center is undergoing a profound shift from CPU-centric design to accelerated computing and generative-AI–centric architectures. The fundamental unit of compute is no longer a single server but a distributed system at rack and cluster scale. Achieving performance now hinges on massive data parallelism—and the interconnect has become the first-order constraint as system scale and bandwidth rise.
This speech traces the evolution of high-speed interconnects in modern data centers and explains why signal integrity now drives the ecosystem. We will also show how hardware-architecture innovations can relieve interconnect bottlenecks and unlock scalable performance.