Optoelectronic backplane for parallel computing

Summary form only given. Optical interconnects can support a larger number of I/O and can achieve higher bandwidths for less power than electrical interconnects. Fixed receiver path (FRP) networks, where each processor in the network has a unique receive path, reduce the complexity of on-chip data-path and control logic, as well as exploit the I/O count and bandwidth advantages of optoelectronics to increase the network bandwidth and to reduce node latencies. We show the backplane components of a 64-processor FRP-network having four processors per processor board and 16 switch ICs providing the optical-to-electrical interface and network switching. With eight-bit wide datapaths, this network requires 512 (64/spl times/8) optical lines.