Potential and pitfalls of silicon photonics computing and interconnect

Trends in SoC design are leading to 3D integration of thousands of high-performance computing resources and high-throughput interconnects, opening up new research directions for hybrid electronic/photonic architectures. In this paper, we introduce how state of the art silicon-photonic devices can realize elementary operations that are traditionally performed by electronic devices, e.g. circuit switching and Boolean function computation. We then highlight how these devices need to be assembled in order to realize more complex functions, taking into account the constraints specific to silicon-photonic technology. In the last part, we summarize the main research directions for the near future.