ISSCC 2009: Optical I/O Technology for Tera-Scale Computing

The microprocessor architecture transition from multi-core to many-core will drive increased chip-to-chip I/O bandwidth demands at processor/memory interfaces and in multi-processor systems. Future architectures will require bandwidths of 200GB/s to 1.0TB/s and will bring about the era of tera-scale computing. To meet these bandwidth demands, traditional electrical interconnect techniques require increases in circuit complexity and costlier materials. However, without lower loss electrical interconnects, this method of increasing I/O bandwidth in electrical links eventually comes at the cost of reducing interconnect link length, reducing signal integrity or increasing power consumption. Optical interconnect with its terahertz bandwidth, low loss, and low cross-talk has been proposed to replace electrical interconnect between chips. This paper describes results for both near and long-term chip-to-chip optical interconnect architectures.