Chip scale photonic interconnects for energy-performance optimized computing

As computational performance continues to scale in chip multiprocessors with increasing numbers of cores, the gap between the available off-chip bandwidth and that which is required to appropriately feed the processors continues to widen under current architectures. For many high-performance computing applications, the bandwidth available for both on- and off-chip communications can play a vital role in efficient execution due to the use of data-parallel or data-centric algorithms. Electronic interconnected systems are increasingly bound by their communications infrastructure and the associated power dissipation of high-bandwidth data movement. Recent advances in chip-scale silicon photonic technologies have created the potential for developing optical interconnection networks that can offer highly energy efficient communications and significantly improve computing performance-per-Watt. This paper examines the design and performance of photonic networks-on-chip architectures that support both on-chip communication and off-chip memory access in an energy efficient manner.