skip to main content
10.1145/1531542.1531607acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesglsvlsiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

Analysis of challenges for on-chip optical interconnects

Published: 10 May 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Optical interconnects are touted as the solution to the performance bottleneck of future interconnects in scaled technology nodes. Though significant strides have been made in realizing silicon photonic devices that can give high performance in controlled lab environments, there still exist technical challenges preventing dense integration and reliability in widely varying conditions. This paper examines such problems while suggesting possible solution space and proposing some alternatives. We also calculate the actual power advantage that optical links will have compared to an electrical link while considering the thermal stabilization and other technological issues. We show that the ~4X power advantage that ideal on-chip global optical interconnects have been projected to have is reduced to null when the power required for thermal regulation of critical optical components alone are added into the calculations. We also discuss latency, spatial bandwidth, polarization and a host of other technological issues and reassess the benefits of dense on-chip optical interconnects for dense global routing.

References

[1]
W.A. Wulf and S.A. Mckee, Hitting the memory wall: Implications of the obvious, Computer Architecture News, Mar. 1995.
[2]
K. Saraswat et al., "Effect of Interconnection Scaling on Time Delay of VLSI Circuits, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, pp. 645--50, April 1982.
[3]
Ho, R., Mai, K.W., Horowitz, M.A.; "The future of wires, Proceedings of the IEEE, Volume 89, Issue 4, April 2001.
[4]
ITRS-2004, Interconnect, International Technology Roadmap for semiconductor, 2004 Update.
[5]
G. Chen et al. "Electrical and optical on-chip interconnects in scaled microprocessors. In International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, pages 2514--2517, Japan, May 2005.
[6]
Pappu, A. and Apsel, A; "Electrical isolation and fanout in intra-chip optical interconnects, International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, Vancouver, Canada, May 2004 Page(s):II - 533--6.
[7]
M. Kobrinsky et al. On-chip optical interconnects. Intel Technology Journal, 08(02), May 2004.
[8]
Ian O'Connor. "Optical solutions for system-level interconnect. In International Workshop on System-Level Interconnect Prediction, pages 79--88, Paris, February 2004.
[9]
A. Louri and A. K. Kodi. "An optical interconnection network and a modified snooping protocol for the design of large-scale symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs). IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 15(12):1093--1104, December 2004.
[10]
N. Kirman et al. "On-chip Optical Technology in Future Bus-based Multicore Designs: Opportunities and Challenges," IEEE Micro, Vol. 27, No. 1, January/February 2007.
[11]
Assaf Shacham, et al. Photonic Networks-on-Chip for Future Generations of Chip Multi-Processors, IEEE Transactions of Computers, Vol.57, N0.-, 2008.
[12]
Hyundai et.al. A Hybrid silicon evanescent laser fabricated with a silicon waveguide and III-V offset quantum wells., optics express, 2005 13(23).
[13]
A. Liu et.al. A high-speed silicon optical modulator based on a metal-oxide-semiconductor capacitor," Nature, 427, 615--618 (2004).
[14]
L. Lia et al., "High speed silicon Mach-Zehnder modulator, Optics Express, Vol. 13, No. 8, pp. 3129--3135, April 2005.
[15]
Q. Xu, B. Schmidt, S. Pradhan, and M. Lipson, "Micrometre-scale silicon electro-optic modulator, Nature, Vol. 435, pp. 325--327, 19 May 2005.
[16]
Yin, T.; Pappu, A.M.; Apsel, A.B.; "Low-Cost, High-Efficiency, and High-Speed SiGe Phototransistors in Commercial BiCMOS" Photonics Technology Letters, IEEE Volume 18, Issue 1, Jan. 1 2006 Page(s):55 -- 57.
[17]
Ansheng Liu et.al. Net optical gain in a low loss silicon-on-insulator waveguide by stimulated Raman Scattering, optics express, vol.12, issue18, 2004.
[18]
R. Amatya et al., "Low Power Thermal Tuning of Second-Order Microring Resonators," in Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics/Quantum Electronics and Laser Science, 2007.
[19]
R. A. Soref and B. R. Bennett, "Electrooptical effects in silicon," IEEE J. Quantum Electron. 23, 123--129 (1987).
[20]
Xu, Q et al. "12.5 Gbit/s carrier-injection-based silicon micro-ring silicon modulators, Optics Express, Vol. 15, No. 2, 430, 22 January 2007.
[21]
F.Xia, L. Sekaric, Y.Vlasov, "Ultra-compact optical buffers on a silicon chip, Nature Photonics, 1, 65, January 2007
[22]
Jong-Moo Lee et al. "Temperature Dependence of Silicon Nanophotonic Ring Resonator With a Polymeric Overlayer, Journal Of Lightwave Technology, VOL. 25, NO. 8, Aug. 2007.
[23]
Shacham, B.G. Lee, K. Bergman, A Wideband, Non-Blocking, 2x2 Switching Node for a SPINet Network," IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., 17, (12) pp.2742--2744, (Dec 2005).
[24]
G.T. Reed et. al. "Are smaller devices Always better?, Japanes journal of applied physics, 45(2006), pp.6609--6615.
[25]
Bryan black, et. al, "Die Stacking (3D) Microarchitecture, 39th IEEE/ACM international symposium on Microarchitecture, pages:469:479, December 2006.
[26]
IBM Press Release MADE IN IBM LABS: IBM Cools 3-D Chips with H2O" http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/24385.wss.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Robust Optical Mode Converter Based on Topological Waveguide ArraysChinese Physics B10.1088/1674-1056/ad3811Online publication date: 27-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Evolutionary strategy combined to Fuzzy Logic and Shannon’s Entropy to maximize the optimization of optical coupler designSoftwareX10.1016/j.softx.2024.10183527(101835)Online publication date: Sep-2024
  • (2022)The design of on-chip digital Fourier transform spectrometerSeventh Asia Pacific Conference on Optics Manufacture (APCOM 2021)10.1117/12.2612776(90)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2022
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Analysis of challenges for on-chip optical interconnects

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    GLSVLSI '09: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Great Lakes symposium on VLSI
    May 2009
    558 pages
    ISBN:9781605585222
    DOI:10.1145/1531542
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 10 May 2009

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. modulator
    2. on-chip optical interconnect
    3. polarization sensitivity
    4. ring-resonator
    5. thermal sensitivity

    Qualifiers

    • Short-paper

    Conference

    GLSVLSI '09
    Sponsor:
    GLSVLSI '09: Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2009
    May 10 - 12, 2009
    MA, Boston Area, USA

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 312 of 1,156 submissions, 27%

    Upcoming Conference

    GLSVLSI '25
    Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2025
    June 30 - July 2, 2025
    New Orleans , LA , USA

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)31
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5
    Reflects downloads up to 15 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Robust Optical Mode Converter Based on Topological Waveguide ArraysChinese Physics B10.1088/1674-1056/ad3811Online publication date: 27-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Evolutionary strategy combined to Fuzzy Logic and Shannon’s Entropy to maximize the optimization of optical coupler designSoftwareX10.1016/j.softx.2024.10183527(101835)Online publication date: Sep-2024
    • (2022)The design of on-chip digital Fourier transform spectrometerSeventh Asia Pacific Conference on Optics Manufacture (APCOM 2021)10.1117/12.2612776(90)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2022
    • (2022)High-Speed Interconnects: History, Evolution, and the Road AheadIEEE Microwave Magazine10.1109/MMM.2021.313626823:8(66-82)Online publication date: Aug-2022
    • (2019)Machine learning-based dynamic reconfiguration algorithm for reconfigurable NoCsIEICE Electronics Express10.1587/elex.16.2018104016:2(20181040-20181040)Online publication date: 2019
    • (2019)Spoof Plasmon Interconnects—Communications Beyond RC LimitIEEE Transactions on Communications10.1109/TCOMM.2018.287424267:1(599-610)Online publication date: Jan-2019
    • (2018)Analysis of Hair Shine Using Rendering and Subjective EvaluationACM Transactions on Applied Perception10.1145/327447815:4(1-17)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
    • (2018)Constraint-aware software-defined network for routing real-time multimediaACM SIGBED Review10.1145/3267419.326742515:3(37-42)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2018
    • (2018)X-lapACM SIGBED Review10.1145/3267419.326742215:3(19-24)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2018
    • (2018)Routing algorithms for IEEE802.1Qbv networksACM SIGBED Review10.1145/3267419.326742115:3(13-18)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2018
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media